ABSTRACT
Organisation whether private or public relies on its manpower to translate its goals into tangible reality. The Nigerian civil service which is the “engine” of governance, at the federal, state of local government level, relies solely on its manpower to translate policies to fruition. Overtime, it has become palpable that the civil service is fraught with incompetence among its staff and thereby failing to deliver its functions. The reason for such failures is not far-fetched as the process of manpower selection and capacity building has become lackluster. The process face, godfatherism interference, and emphasis on federal character. This study examined manpower selection and capacity building in the Nigerian civil service; a study of Edo State. The study identified three specific objectives which are; to examine if recruitment, selection and capacity building of employees in Edo State civil service are based on merit; to investigate if federal character principle determine recruitment, selection and capacity building in Edo State civil service and to investigate if recruitment into Edo State civil service is influenced by external factors. To explore these objectives, four research questions were posed forempirical data collection. Descriptive survey method was used to carry out the study, while primary and secondary data was used for the research. The instrument for data collection was a structured five point Likert questionnaire which has two section. The First section was the personal data of respondents, while the second section was divided into three parts on each objectives of the study. The population of the study was two thousand, five hundred and seventy five (2,575) which are the entire staff of Edo State civil service, from this population, a sample size of one hundred and eighty (180) were drawn from the sample frame of grade level 01-17 through simple random sampling technique. The primary data collected, was analysed through simple percentage to determine the opinion of the respondents on the study objectives. The findings from the analysed questionnaire revealed that; appointments are given before vacancies are made known to the general public; it reveals that for employment into the civil service, emphases are placed on the candidate ethnicity and political zone and external factors such as godfatherism, monetary exhortation from job applicants and favouritism play out in the civil service manpower selection and capacity building. Based on these findings, the study recommends that; the practice of appointment being given to cronies of government before vacancies are announced to the general public should be stopped; the civil service should carry out training after appointment of staff to ensure capacity development of staffs; and the covert or overt practice of godfatherism, favouritism, tribe sentiment, and monetary requirement being perpetrated by various committees set up for employment should be investigated and those involved punished
