A Leadership Training Program for Public Servants in Nigeria

December 3, 2025

A Leadership Training Program for Public Servants in Nigeria

Sam Abayomi Otenaike | 2025

Abstract

The Nigerian public service, particularly at the local government level, is crucial in national development and governance. Nevertheless, poor leadership, corruption, inadequate accountability, and weak institutional frameworks have made service delivery almost impossible. Declining trust in governance, slow economic development, and continued underdevelopment, especially in rural areas, have resulted from inefficiencies in public service. Nigeria’s existing public service reform initiatives, like the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) and Service Compact for Nigerians (SERVICOM), have been instituted to enhance transparency, accountability, and efficiency, but successful implementation has proven difficult.

This project aims to design a leadership training program for public servants in Nigeria to improve service delivery by closing identified leadership gaps, putting public administration in tandem with proven best practices, and ultimately promoting national development bottom-up from the grassroots. The project uses the guiding framework of the Servant and Transformational Leadership Theories to outline public leaders’ roles in meeting the needs of their followers and stakeholders, fostering creativity and innovation in service delivery, and formulating and communicating vision and strategy. The methodology compares leadership development programs in Nigeria and some African countries, case studies from the UK and Singapore, and draws lessons incorporated into the training program.

The leadership training program output is structured as a values-based, three-tiered manual comprising the Basic, Intermediate, and Executive Modules to address the distinct developmental needs of local government officers at different career stages.

Keywords: public servants, grassroots, governance, effectiveness, corruption, NEPAD, case studies, SERVICOM, servant and transformational leadership, values-based, training manual

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