Nigeria’s civil service has been called too big, too expensive and inefficient for decades. Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, successive governments have tried to shrink or restructure the public service. But there is a more basic question: Do we actually have too many civil servants?
In June 1999, former President Olusegun Obasanjo established the Ahmed Joda Panel to examine inefficiencies in government institutions and recommend reforms to improve their performance. More than a decade later, the Goodluck Jonathan administration received the Oronsaye Report in 2012, which recommended merging, abolishing or restructuring several federal agencies to reduce duplication and the cost of governance. But behind these repeated efforts is a basic question that has rarely been answered.
How Large Is Nigeria’s Civil Service in the First Place?
There is no publicly available, up-to-date headcount covering public servants across the Federal Government, 36 states, the FCT and 774 local governments. The clearest federal benchmark we found comes from the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), which said in 2022 that the Integrated Personnel and Payroll Information System had reduced the federal workforce from more than 800,000 to about 720,000 workers. At the state level, no equivalent consolidated database exists.
However, the absence of a definitive national headcount has not stopped the debate over whether Nigeria’s civil service is bloated. In September 2023, President Bola Tinubu expressed concern about Nigeria’s “bloated civil service payroll” at federal and sub-national levels.
Meeting Oracle executives at the State House, Tinubu said he was frightened by the payroll figures and questioned how the government could finance infrastructure when such a large share of revenue was being absorbed by personnel costs. But not everyone agrees that the problem is simply the number of workers. In 2025, however, the Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, Prof. Tunji Olaopa, argued that it was wrong to describe the Federal Civil Service as bloated. Olaopa argued that benchmarking Nigeria’s federal workforce against those of other countries showed that it was actually relatively small. The deeper problem, he argued, is a mismatch between the people already in the service and the skills the government actually needs.
So, Is Nigeria’s Civil Service Bloated?
To find out, we compared Nigeria with five countries across different regions: Brazil in South America, India in Asia, Germany in Europe, South Africa in Africa and the United States in North America. Where possible, we used the closest equivalent of a federal, central, or national civilian government workforce, rather than the entire public sector, so that state, provincial, and local government employees did not distort the comparison. Here’s what we found:
Looking at absolute numbers alone would still tell us very little. India, for instance, has more than three million Central Government civilian employees, while Germany has about 355,600 federal civilian public servants. But India also has a population of more than 1.4 billion people, compared with Germany’s roughly 84 million. To make the comparison more meaningful, we adjusted each country’s workforce for population and asked a simpler question: Out of every 1,000 people, how many work for the federal or central government?
The results place Nigeria in the lower half of the group. India had about 2.1 central-government civilian workers per 1,000 people, followed by Brazil at 2.7. Nigeria’s estimated 720,000 federal workers translated to approximately 3.2 workers per 1,000 people. Germany recorded about 4.2, South Africa 5.1, while the United States had approximately 6.6 federal civilian workers per 1,000 people. In other words, Nigeria had the third-lowest ratio among the six countries examined. Only India and Brazil employed fewer federal or central government workers relative to their populations, while Germany, South Africa, and the United States all recorded higher ratios.
What Do the Numbers Tell Us?
On this measure, Nigeria does not appear to have an unusually large federal workforce. It’s estimated that 3.2 federal civilian workers per 1,000 people is lower than the ratios recorded in other comparative countries. But more importantly, the finding lends support to an argument made by Prof. Tunji Olaopa, Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission, who said in 2025 that benchmarking Nigeria’s federal workforce against other countries showed that it was “actually small.”
But headcount alone cannot answer whether Nigeria’s civil service is bloated. It does not tell us whether workers are productive, whether personnel costs are sustainable, whether agencies duplicate one another, or whether employees are concentrated in areas where they are not needed. Nor does it tell us whether the people in the service have the skills required to perform the government’s functions effectively. That distinction is important because Olaopa has argued that Nigeria’s problem is not simply the number of people employed, but the composition of the workforce. As he put it, “we have a huge number of staff, most of whom lack the requisite skills to function, while the skills that the system needs are scarce.”
There are also limitations to the international comparison. Governments are organised differently, and there is no perfectly identical definition of a federal or central civilian employee across all six countries. The figures, therefore, represent the closest comparable national-level workforce measures available, rather than perfectly uniform categories.
Even with that caveat, the comparison makes it difficult to explain Nigeria’s public-service problems simply by pointing to the size of its federal workforce. Nigeria may have duplicated agencies, high personnel costs, ghost workers, or too many employees in particular functions while remaining understaffed in others. These are problems of how the workforce is organised and deployed, rather than necessarily a problem of having too many workers overall.
Former Budget Office Director-General Ben Akabueze made a similar point in 2023. Speaking at a House of Representatives investigative hearing, he said: “I don’t agree in aggregate because my view is that we are overstaffed in some areas and significantly short-staffed in other areas, like in our policing and other agencies.”
The evidence, therefore, points to a more useful question. Instead of asking only whether Nigeria has too many civil servants, perhaps we should be asking whether the government has the right number of people, with the right skills, working in the right places for the good people of Nigeria.
References
Bureau of Public Service Reforms. (2022). 2022 annual report. The Presidency, Federal Republic of Nigeria. https://bpsr.gov.ng/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Latest-2022-ANNUAL-REPORT_compressed-1.pdf
Government of India, Ministry of Finance, Department of Expenditure. (2024). Annual report on pay and allowances of Central Government civilian employees 2023–24. Pay Research Unit. https://doe.gov.in/files/annual_reports_documents/AnnualReportonPayAllowance202324.pdf
Ministério da Gestão e da Inovação em Serviços Públicos. (2024). Relatório de servidores ativos por cor/raça e etnia. Governo Federal do Brasil. https://www.gov.br/servidor/pt-br/observatorio-de-pessoal-govbr/arquivos/rlp-servidores-ativos-etnia_2024.pdf
National Treasury, Republic of South Africa. (2024). Estimates of national expenditure 2024: Introduction. https://www.treasury.gov.za/documents/National%20Budget/2024/ene/Introduction.pdf
Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis). (2024). Personnel of public employers at the federal level. Federal Statistical Office of Germany. https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Government/Public-Service/Tables/public-service-personnel-federal-level.html
Teniola, E. (2022, December 19). Outgoing president withdraws to the sidelines. The Guardian Nigeria. https://guardian.ng/opinion/outgoing-president-withdraws-to-the-sidelines/
United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. (2024). World Population Prospects 2024. https://population.un.org/wpp/
U.S. Office of Personnel Management. (2023). FedScope employment cube: September 2023. https://www.opm.gov/data/datasets/Files/691/22b20f93-3b90-472a-91f4-95040b72610a.pdf
