The nation’s civil service has being described as the enemy of progress with its bureaucracy, which must be discarded if it won’t help deliver the nation.

These were the words of the Minister of Education, Professor Ruqayyatu Rufai at a news conference in Abuja on Tuesday, where she criticised the bureaucracy in the civil service and blamed it for the setbacks experienced in the education sectors as well as other sectors.

Professor Rufai explained that the running’s of the civil service has become an obstacle for projects aimed at improving the lot of Nigerians and that most of the hitches being experienced in the education sector would be unnecessary if the bureaucracy was reduced.

“If we have a bureaucracy that is not working, then we don’t need it” she affirmed.

She expressed the immense constraints the executive arm of government is going through in getting job done. “Anything you are seeing us (me and most of my colleagues) doing now, we are doing it out of real struggle because the system is a kind of system that we don’t even understand” she stated.

“Civil servants must also change their attitude because they are creating problems to every minister in this administration; otherwise, things would have gone a long way by now.”

The Minister urged for reforms in the civil service, stating that “there is a transformation agenda under this regime, which means that within the next four years of Mr President’s mandate, everything has to change” adding that “we have to reverse to those good old days that will always make Nigeria, a point of reference and we can”.

She also decried the lack of initiative in the civil service and their failure to appreciate, stating that “in the civil service, they also supposed to have their initiative that will help but, when one has the initiative, getting the initiative all around is another challenge.”

She called for speedy transformation in the service if the federal government’s transformation agenda will succeed.