Permanent Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Communication Technology, Dr. Tunji Olaopa, has called for a change in the bureaucratic culture within the civil service to give a new logic of open government to the system.
Speaking at the 2014 annual public lecture for the public service week in Lagos yesterday, Dr. Olaopa said cultures must be dropped within the civil service, a statement from the minister said. He said the tendency to want to follow rules and regulations blindly, subversion of meritocracy due to weak systemic controls and a culture of playing safe and risk aversion needed to be reviewed.
Dr. Olaopa who spoke on the bureaucratic administrative civil service structure and how it responds to the challenges of open government said the challenge for public managers resides in the Official Secret Act-conditioned subsisting orientation which renders governments operations as being synonymous with the hoarding of information and where provided, are scanty and propagandist and failing to properly address the concerns of the citizenry.
This information gap he said is invariably filled with inflammatory information from social media users, sources that are neither controlled nor substantiated.
