Oath of Secrecy in the Nigerian Public Service

Abstract

Oath of secrecy is part of the civil service tradition for employees to take an oath of office of allegiance before their assumption of duty, but the manner, timing, and wordings of the recent oath of secrecy administered to the People Democratic Party, National Assembly and Presidency Workers can only be indicatively unambiguous phobia and deep-seated disdain for free flow of information on the part of the clearly desperate master minders of the whole unedifying exercise. No doubt, most of these workers have been in the employ of these institutions many years before the present sets of leadership was inaugurated and the assumption is that they would have performed this mandatory exercise long before now. The paper conceptualized public service and oath of secrecy. It goes on to highlight the background to the oath of secrecy and its location within the concept of administrative loyalty. It also examines the implications of the act on transparency initiatives in the Nigeria public service. The paper goes on to explore the manifestations of arts of disloyalty among civil servant and the consequences. The paper, therefore, shares the thesis that the oath of secrecy was a pointless and wasted exercise whose only benefit is the bad image it would return to the PDP, Presidency and the National Assembly because of its timing. Though the paper supports the oath of secrecy in the public service but concludes by positing that Nigerian leaders cannot afford to portray themselves as sworn enemies of openness, accountability, anti-corruption and transparency, which now widely defined the concept of good governance.