An Aragalaya needed for public sector reform

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has instructed to conduct a formal study on the public service with the aim of providing quality public service in a short period of time and increasing employee satisfaction. 

During a special discussion held at the President’s House on Friday, on the role of the Ministry of Public Administration, Home Affairs and Local Government and the accelerated home gardening programme, he pointed out the need to consolidate state institutions to provide uniform service to all. The President also said that the decentralization of key public institutions in the capital to the provinces could reduce the number of public servants coming to Colombo.

It is not clear whether this meeting was convened to discuss the need to reform the entire public service which is a long felt need. The meeting seems to have been called instead to address the issues emanating from the current economic crisis as the reduction of the number of public servants coming to Colombo and accelerated home gardening programme were the main issues that had been referred to in the statement issued by the President’s media.

Public service is one of the main contributors along with politics, bureaucracy and trade unions that could be attributed to the current socio-economic decadence of the country. In spite of politicians being always targeted when corruption, large scale waste, mismanagement and other socio-economic ills are being discussed, the politicians in fact thrive on the degeneration of bureaucracy and public service. Trade unions, while ironically protesting against the high profile corruption committed by the politicians and the high ranking officials in the state sector,  contribute to the same degree of corruption, wittingly or unwittingly through the inefficient public service, the members of which are the members of theirs as well.

President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, weeks after he assumed office visited the main office of the Motor Traffic Department in Werahera and witnessed the chaotic situation in the government offices. It has been a habit of people who need to get solutions to their problems from a government office to seek the assistance of a person who knows somebody working in that office. The reason is that they know how they would be treated by the officials of that office. It is common knowledge that except for a small number of employees of the public sector all others pay meagre attention to the needs of the public. Though the advent of computers has changed this situation considerably, the attitudes have not changed much. 

The lethargic attitude and inefficiency in public sector has been prevalent so long that they have been ridiculed in many Sinhala stage plays, movies, tele dramas and songs. The trade unions never see this degeneration on the part of their members. Some years back in a rare incident, a trade union leader himself had complained to former President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe that 60% of the 1.5 million public servants (both under the central government and provincial councils) were engaged in browsing the internet, visiting several social media platforms and other entertainment sites using the office computers and their own smart phones for more than two hours of their daily eight-hour duty. 

Amidst this lethargic nature in the public sector towards the problems of the people, corruption in the public sector at the hands of the high ranking officials seems to take place at full-throttle. 

The ongoing meetings of the Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE) these days expose how the public funds are, and have been wasted and robbed. This has been going on for decades. The COPE had in 2017 revealed that Rs.110 billion losses incurred to the State from 15 public institutions between May 1 and August 31, 2016 (within four months). Similar or even bigger corrupt practices in the public sector had been exposed by the COPE and Public Account Committee (PAC) of Parliament before and after this. The corrupt officials have also been blamed for the current power crisis in the sector for a long time. 

It must be understood that the politicians alone cannot engage in frauds involving billions of rupees without the help of the rogue and corrupt officials.