ABSTRACT

Every country in the world has a Civil Service of one sort or another, that is, a body of officials responsible for advising the government of the day on matters of policy and for implementing the decisions reached by the government. In order, therefore, to understand the Civil Service structure of the former British West African colonies, the authors should first briefly examine the characteristics of the British Civil Service, the model from which they have all derived. The administrative class is hierarchical in structure, ranging in grade from the level of Assistant Principal, a training grade to which new entrants are appointed, to the grade of Permanent Secretary, the seniormost grade in the class, which provides the permanent, as opposed to the political, heads of all the ministries. Civil servants in Commonwealth West Africa can be divided into permanent and temporary, established and unestablished.