THE MISSING LINK IN PUBLIC SECTOR AUTOMATION: HUMAN CAPITAL INTELLIGENCE AND WORKFORCE OPTIMIZATION IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Nigeria's Federal Civil Service was ushered into 2026 as a formally paperless institution and this became a celebrated landmark in the country's decade long ambition to digitise Public Administration. Yet beneath this milestone lies a disquieting reality: the workforce that is expected to sustain and make meaningful this digital infrastructure remains largely unmapped, underqualified, and misaligned with the demands of a modern public service. This paper argues that technology-first reform in Nigeria has inadvertently displaced a more foundational imperative, which is the need of the auditing and systematic intelligence-gathering on human capital. Drawing on the Federal Government's own Personnel Audit and Skills Gap Analysis (PASGA) initiative launched in 2025, alongside international literature on digital governance and human resource reform in developing states, the paper contends that no meaningful public sector transformation can be anchored on a workforce whose composition, competencies, and gaps are not first rigorously understood. The concept of Human Capital Intelligence, which is the deliberate, data-driven mapping of workforce capacity as a prerequisite for reform, is advanced as the missing link in Nigeria's public sector modernisation agenda. The paper concludes that investing in knowing the workforce is not preparatory work; it is the work itself.