Banking executive and foundation chairman Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede has warned the Nigerian government against confusing technology deployment with genuine institutional reform, telling a senior gathering of civil servants that digitizing a broken process only accelerated its dysfunction rather than correcting it.

Speaking at the International Civil Service Conference 2026 in Abuja, Aig-Imoukhuede argued that no nation could rise above the quality of its public service, describing the civil service as the machinery through which the republic acts. He said politicians might set direction and investors might provide capital, but the civil service was ultimately what converted national ambition into administrative reality. A slow, confused, or corrupt civil service, he said, produced exactly those qualities in the government it served.

He said reforming the civil service should no longer be treated as an internal government housekeeping matter. It was a national economic imperative with direct consequences for growth, investment attraction, and citizen trust. He said the country needed a high-capacity delivery institution capable of working with the private sector without compromising public purpose or accountability.

On public-private partnerships, Aig-Imoukhuede was pointed. He said a collaboration that enriched vendors without improving citizens’ lives was not reform but failure dressed in modern language. He said government was not a customer to be exploited but the trustee of public purpose, and that the private sector had to approach it as a nation-building partner rather than a source of contracts and profits.

He said the test of reform was not what was announced but what the citizen experienced: reduced waiting time, improved service reliability, lower leakages, increased satisfaction, and stronger revenue collection. He said many Nigerian reform failures occurred not at the policy design stage but during implementation and post-award accountability, and called for stronger procurement, vendor management, and performance monitoring systems within the civil service.

He identified passport issuance, healthcare logistics, procurement systems, tax administration, and citizen feedback mechanisms as among the most practical areas for immediate improvement, and said many of these did not require large capital outlays but demanded discipline, coordination, and execution. He warned that civil servants must insist on transparency, protect the public interest, and institutionalize reforms that outlasted political administrations.