“Public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation”—Margaret Chase Smith.
If today, fingers are being raised against the civil servants of Pakistan, it calls for some serious brainstorming, deliberations, and considerations of revamping the entire institution, which serves as the country’s administrative backbone. Just as there is a need to efficiently run a corporate body, there is also a dire need to professionally manage the myriad departments that constitute both federal and provincial governments, if the country has to progress in a highly competitive world.
Browsing through the web, one comes across innumerable articles thoughtfully written on various aspects of civil servants. These mostly grim observations relate to their attitude (negative most of the time), poor perceptions of civil servants about their own job, inability to deliver, moral turpitude, lack of interest in their assigned functions, inhumanity, arrogance, misuse of power, political leanings, and a lot more. In a lighter vein, the most common joke about our civil servants runs like, “They are the ones who are paid by the government to do nothing, and if the public wants anything done, it has to pay them.”
When questioned, people from all walks of life who have interacted with civil servants have a long list of complaints, and rarely do they come up with something truly pleasant about their experiences. Shabbir Ahmed, in an article, writes: “Half the business community’s woes can be attributed to a bloated, inefficient, and insensitive bureaucracy. We keep scurrying for sifarish, to have access to the decision maker; we even have to press Quaid-e-Azam into service to speed things up. The quality and speed of decisions by the bureaucracy have a major impact on our operations. The 'institutional framework' has a direct bearing on our competitiveness”.
When candidates earnestly aspire for a particular job, they will definitely put their heart and soul into achieving success in that field
Generally, the private sector enterprises seek the right man for the right job, and after that, apply strict performance criteria for retention and promotion. In most advertisements related to job vacancies, certain qualifications and experiences are specifically mentioned. If, for example, someone is looking for an accountant, persons with knowledge of accountancy would be sought. In the same manner, a company hiring a marketing expert will not appoint a medical doctor. Where fresh graduates are recruited, they are made to undergo on-the-job training before assigning them independent posts. On the contrary, public service recruits come from varying educational backgrounds and are randomly appointed in different departments on the basis of a competitive examination.
Specialisation is the keyword in today’s world. Although every single doctor earns an MBBS degree, a general practitioner would refrain from prescribing medicines to a heart patient. Similarly, an FRCPS-qualified gynecologist would never dare perform an open-heart surgery.
Government departments, both at the federal and provincial levels, demand an understanding of some basic things peculiar to their work. A simple example would be that of foreign service, where international relations, world history, political science, command over a foreign language, social etiquette, etc., should be the prerequisites. Those having a limited world view and lacking some of these qualities cannot be expected to handle sensitive international desks in the foreign office, and a few weeks of specialised training may not be able to accomplish the fundamental requisites of diplomacy.
The same is true for departments requiring, for example, economists at their core, or experts in public transport and communication, or degree holders in business and accounting, or public health specialists in the health sector. As Otto von Bismarck has aptly stated: “With bad laws and good civil servants it’s still possible to govern. But with bad civil servants even the best laws can’t help”.
In order to straighten up things and bring about sensibility in hiring, and improve the quality of civil servants, recruitment through the Federal/Provincial Public Service Commission should be split up on the basis of each occupational group. Thus, a person willing to serve in the not-too-popular Postal group, should sit an exam meant for it.
Likewise, those who have basic qualifications for working in various revenue departments should appear in an exam specially designed for such services. Those specialising in agriculture, for example, could be hired through these commissions to work in this sector, rather than placing there an electrical engineer having no knowledge about plants or raising crops.
One learns not so much from textbooks as one does by involvement. The training process should be over a span of at least eighteen months, with the candidates being made to learn the complete ins and outs of their parent department and go through the most fundamental aspects of what is eventually expected of them.
The rigours of training should be meant to make them competent at their work, to instill confidence to allow them to have cordial relations with their colleagues, good grooming in etiquette and behaviour, and thorough understanding of different problems that members of the public are likely to face and which they are supposed to resolve. The catchphrase should be “Facilitation without fear or favour”.
When candidates earnestly aspire for a particular job, they will definitely put their heart and soul into achieving success in that field. Instead of discriminating against services on the basis of elitist and commonplace ones, the concept of true public service needs to be infused. There is an urgent need to bring about equity and rationality in the entire service structure; otherwise, as Winston Churchill said, “After a time, civil servants tend to become no longer servants and no longer civil”.
It is high time that this dismal image of civil servants is replaced with a more somber and humanistic one. In Andrew Cuomo’s words: “I believe we need to attract a new generation of the best and brightest to public service, and I believe that government can be a source of inspiration, not degradation”.