Ambode assures on building 21st Century quintessential civil service

Lagos State governor, Mr. Akinwunmi Ambode, has said that his administration is poised to engage the core of the state public servants in training and retraining in order to enhance greater and effective productivity on their part to the overall benefit of the state.
The governor said this in his address at the opening of a two-day training session for the state civil servants, which is holding at Ikeja, with the theme: “Human Resources Counselling in the Workplace,” even as he assured that Lagos State would move from being the fifth largest economy in Africa to being the third largest by the Year 2023.
Governor Ambode, who was represented by the state’s Commissioner for Establishments, Training and Pensions, Dr. Akintola Benson Oke, said the need to embark on the exercise was borne out of the fact that he had since realised that “in order to deliver effective and efficient service to the people, officers of Lagos state public service must be continually equipped with necessary competencies and skills.”
“Indeed, the aim of the Lagos State government is to transform the civil service into the quintessential future workforce that can, in addition to delivering an effective HR service and getting basic people processes right, while also responding to the government’s current and future challenges in terms of skills gap and functionality,” he said.
While saying that numerous training programmes had been approved and organised for the officers to be able to meet the present challenges and deliver on the fundamental commitments to Lagosians, the governor contended that the choice of the theme was to examine how the civil service could better utilise counselling to assist officers fulfill their full potentials within the service.
According to him, the theme of the training, “Human Resources Counselling in the Workplace,” will further the state government’s efforts to fulfill its role of staffing government and civil service positions with qualified and suitable candidates.
He said this was to ensure that the critical organs of the state civil service, the government and the society at large would be positioned to run more effectively and efficiently.
“It is about human resources, human counselling. You know counselling is a very fundamental issue in any organisation and in Lagos State, counselling plays a major role in the life of the public servants. Once you counsel very well, there is every likelihood that the public servants would have to do their jobs according to the right ethics, according to the right rules, according to the right process. It would inform adequate decision making process and this thing will lead to greater and effective productivity.
“Secondly, it is for them (civil servants) to be able cope effectively with their counterparts all over the world because if we have effective decision-making process on ground, there is every likelihood that everything that we do would yield positive results.
“The training would be a continuous process to ensure efficiency in the public service in order to increase productivity among the public servants and also to ensure that Lagos State public servants will be able to cope effectively with their counterparts in other climes.
“What we are expecting is for them to be able to cope with the components that involve human behaviour, human resources discipline and counselling organs so that they would apply them to the specificities of Lagos Public Service and there and then their productivity would be enhanced and through enhancement, it would affect the government in their service delivery,” Governor Ambode stated.
He, however, expressed the belief that participants would acquire requisite knowledge that would stand them in good stead to serve the state for a very long time.
“I am thus very confident that the participants at this training will acquire a harvest load of knowledge that will stand them in good stead to serve Lagos State for a very long time,” he said.