Making the Public Service efficient: Fix the system 

February 19, 2017, 9:32 pm

Financial Crimes Investigation Division (FCID) targets public sector corruption (file photo)

In the run up to the last Presidential election, Public Sector institutions were a focal point of criticism of politicians, saying they were riddled with corruption, waste and inefficiency. Surprisingly, the same politicians, after being in power for two years, raise the same issues now and blame the public servants citing the same reasons, confirming the situation remains unchanged. When the people come out and protest on public roads, politicians again find fault with public servants.

The government should realize the urgent need for public service reforms to change this situation. In today’s competitive world, a strong and efficient public service is critical to the country’s success. Its role in implementing the government’s development programmes is crucial to their successful conclusion. Public servants need to be free of interference and have the freedom and independence to implement their mandates. In this context public service reforms is a priority, without which it is futile to hope for good governance and proper implementation of development projects and programmes of the government.

The government has not taken any meaningful measures to effectively manage the Public Service. The expectation of the people from the public service is greater efficiency and better service. Successive government’s actions for short-term political gain, only reduced the public sector institutions to mere loss making entities riddled with inefficiency, waste and corruption. The people’s mandate to the government is to change it.

Governments in the past attempted to make the public service efficient, and all initiatives started with this goal ended doing the opposite. The perennial expectation that the public sector will be a source of jobs, absence of political will and commitment, stiff resistance to change by the employees of all ranks from the top to bottom of the Public Service, and opposition from public sector Trade Unions stifled them and contributed to their failure.

One can appreciate the euphoria felt by the people with the change of government. However, changing the government will not change the ways the public servants were used to, and are even harder to change them, than changing the government. The malaises confronting their institutions run deep and the public service has been in the process of decomposing. The malaise needs to be addressed to ensure quality public service.

A change in government in itself will not address the malaise confronting the public service. It can, however, open a window to addressing the fundamental question about organizing government. The government is already late, but not too late; to use this window positively, to make meaningful and effective reforms in the public service.

Public Servants should enter this process. They should, however, stay away from partisanship, even the appearance of partisanship. The only thing that gives the Public Service strength, credibility and standing with the people of this country, is its non-partisan status, and the ability to serve all politicians without fear or favour.

The public service is where the best are underpaid and the worst overpaid, where rules and regulations are multiplying, where non-performers are left to linger, where too many management layers are suffocating change; where departments are increasingly being saddled with confusing mandates, and where distrust of government institutions is pushing many to look to the courts for solutions.

The governments have created an abundance of oversight bodies, management constraint measures and vapid performance and evaluation reports. It has only made the machinery of government thicker, more risk averse, and created a veritable army of public servants kept busy turning a crank not attached to anything. We have created a big whale that can’t swim. That’s all what we have done.

This is what the government is doing and tried to do, thinking that you can simply pile on responsibilities to the existing machinery, and somehow emulate private sector management practices; while retaining the command and control approach to operations where things went off the rails.

Controls are fine as long as they are the right controls. But the biggest obstruction to change in the public sector today are the excessive controls, reporting requirements, and limitations on authority, that prevents managers from focusing on excellence and innovative ways in how they do their jobs.

Not only have we overloaded the machinery, we have also misdiagnosed the patient. The thinking that we could somehow make the public sector as efficient as the private sector was misguided. This thinking conveniently overlooks the fact that the public and the private sectors are different in many ways. The blame game plays very differently in both sectors, and the private sector has an unrelenting bottom line, while the public sector has none. In the private sector managers learn to delegate down. In the public sector, managers learn to delegate up.

Many think the public sector should simply be run like the private sector. Is it that easy? There is no bottom line government. There is no market share. There’s no tangible measurement. The private sector doesn’t have what you call Parliament. It doesn’t have a Presidential Secretariat, Prime Minister’s office, Cabinet of Ministers or a Ministry. In the private sector you don’t manage blame, you get things done. It you don’t get things done, you’re out of business. In government, you never go out of business.

The whole public service employment model is outmoded in every respect. In today’s competitive world and fast changing technology, a high performing public service is critical to the success of the government’s development effort. Today’s public servants need to be accustomed to electronic tools, used to new technologies and continuously performing at peak productivity, and looking to use their talents to serve the people better. The red tape, barriers to innovation, desire to avoid responsibility risks and to protecting the status quo need to be changed,

The modern technologies have entered our lives. People want government e-services to be available in the same way as the services in the private sector they use in other activities of their lives. They need services accessed and delivered electronically. The public service must keep up. Modern technology is a means to dramatically improve services as well as reduce cost.

Public servants must be empowered and encouraged to serve as responsible risk takers, fostering a spirit of innovation and responsible risk-taking, throughout the public service. Being innovative means trying new things that may not always work out successfully. Only if managers and employees feel comfortable in innovating to do their jobs better and more efficiently, will the government get the results it is expecting from a 21st century public service.

Just as much as the expectations of public servants today are different than what they were fifty years ago, so too are the expectations of the people. The people expect the government to be effective and responsive. Not surprisingly, what they want from the government is both greater efficiency and better service. The challenge facing the senior leadership of the public service today is to deliver on these expectations of the people.

The country wants a public service that:

Is able to take risks

Is accountable and adaptable

Enhances productivity and removes barriers to efficiency and innovation

Spends prudently and with restraint

Maintain an effective working relationship with elected officials and citizens

Is able to attract, develop, and retain knowledgeable employees

Raja Wickramasinghe

(Retired Public Servant)