On 12 March 2015, the National Steering Committee on Public Service Reforms approved a National Strategy on Public Service Reforms (NSPSR) for presentation to the Federal Executive Council in April.

The Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR) Dr. Joe Abah, said ‘This is big news and very exciting. The National Strategy provides a common vision and a long-term agenda to guide the transformation of the federal public service. The NSPSR is comprehensive, long term, and is aligned with Nigeria’s Vision 20:2020 with the goal of positioning the country in the 20 leading economies in the world by 2020′

The NSPSR is primarily a coordinating mechanism. Many reforms already take place across the public service, but not all of them are communicated. The NSPSR brings all the separate strands of public service reform together, to make better linkages and ensuring these are communicated, and it introduces more effective monitoring, reporting, and evaluation of reforms.

‘The vision of the the NSPSR is to build a world-class public service delivering government policies effectively and implementing programmes with professionalism, integrity, excellence, and passion to secure sustainable national development. The approval of the NSPSR is a cornerstone event on the journey to enacting this vision. ’ said Abah.

The three phases contained in the National Strategy that lead to the vision that Dr. Joe Abah is talking about are:

1. Transform the public service with emphasis on critical institutional changes, restoring professionalism and client focus, and delivering effective basic services by 2017
2. Reinvigorate the public service into a value-based, strong, and well-performing institution by 2020
3. Attain world-class levels of service delivery in the public service by 2025

The NSPSR was developed by the Nigerian Bureau of Public Service Reform (BPSR) with support from the UK Department for International Development (DFID).