Administrative reforms: Professionalise or perish

The centre of administration. Photo: Ershad Ahmed

Every country, developing or developed, carries out administrative reforms intermittently or regularly to make its administrative system efficient, responsive and dynamic to the changing needs and aspirations of the citizens.
According to Frederick Mosher, all administrative reforms aim at "major changes in purpose, function, procedures, and relationships." Dror, a policy expert, perceives the rationale of administrative reforms as "directed change of the main features of an administrative system."
Convergence of views has it that the administrative system of Bangladesh is still conventional in substance and spirit, and therefore it needs to be modernised to gain optimal level of the Civil Service (CS) efficiency. For a developing country like Bangladesh, modernisation of the CS is a necessity.
All governments had taken reform initiatives to modernise the age-old administrative system. Each time, the prevailing administrative system became a guinea-pig for experiments by almost all the governments, which paid lip-service to the issue to appease the expectant citizenry and to meet, on an ad hoc basis, the preconditions of the donor community. Consequently, the efficiency of the administration and the degree of public satisfaction have not truly improved.

Trimming the size
The CS seems "gargantuan" in size but "Lilliputian" in the quality of performance. During the last decade, the role of the government has diminished, so further expansion of the CS will not be justified because redundant workforce will affect the efficiency of the government. Efficiency inheres more in quality than in quantity.
Almost every year, scores of civil servants are recruited by the Public Service Commission, but whether the number of recruits is determined scientifically by each requisitioning ministry with a valid projection is not certain. The recruitment rate does not seem to match with the retirement or mortality rate of the government employees. The relevant ministry is not often staffed with proper persons to carry out research on these vital issues.
The existing CS has to be trimmed to a reasonable size so that the members do not turn parasitic, and the government does not have to pay them simply for unionisation or for acting as "ghost labour." Honest, efficient and neutral civil servants are an asset to all governments. According to a survey, nowadays meritorious persons do not feel attracted to work in the civil service; 47% are eager to go abroad for jobs, 20% are willing to join the civil service, and the rest join other occupations.
If the size of the bureaucracy is reduced to an optimal proportion, the government can save a lot of money, and thus afford to pay attractive emoluments to genuine workers. This will have a positive impact on the efficiency of the administration. The provision of "golden handshake" may also be applied to those government employees who are a liability.
A rational incentive structure has to be formulated to attract and retain scholarly and efficient people, and to depoliticise the CS and make it meritocratic. This will also enable honest civil servants to shun corruption or malpractices. The new pay scales declared by the finance minister in November, 2009, speaks of the benign intent of the government, but the benefits will be meaningful if price control and market monitoring mechanisms are made truly functional.

Rationalising training activities
Efficiency lies at the centre of all reforms. Administrative efficiency rests on the quality of training delivered by the civil service human resources development (HRD) centres. Training is, therefore, a major area of civil service reforms as it plays a critical role in fostering psychological change in the members of the CS. All governments should attach due importance to civil service training based on pragmatic curricula.
The training contents now delivered at the training institutes are mostly economics-biased and rule-oriented; less emphasis is laid on management, ethics, social psychology, behavioural science and English. My long experience as a trainer at BPATC suggests that course contents are designed more on personal choice and on ability of the faculty members to deliver subjects than on the genuine occupational needs of job holders. With the transfer of faculty members elsewhere, subjects of training get altered at the expediency of trainers.
A new kind of micro-politics seems to have penetrated civil service training, which precludes genuine or committed officials from designing need-based, market-driven training curricula. Again, proper persons are not tipped as resource persons to choose vital subjects for training. Personal bias or private interest seem to be the governing principles in selecting resource persons. Consequently, trainees do not get the appropriate inputs needed to develop their professionalism in the respective fields.
With rare exceptions, inefficient people are placed in the CS institutes to head the HRD centres of the civil service. Political expediency and accommodation often act as parameters for designating leadership positions.
Ideally, training needs of the government employees are based on job analysis, and the curricula are based on the assessed training needs. This is not practised by a majority of the public sector training institutes. They are not staffed with competent and committed trainers, so the institutional ethos of the training organisations is not being built.
Administrators who are seconded to the training institutes to work as trainers are expected to be role models. But, in place of role models, unfit persons are pushed into the CS training institutions. There should be a clear policy on the recruitment/appointment/deputation of officers to be placed in the training institutes.
The government has to keep track of the officers who are efficient performers and who have the aptitude for and commitment to training. They should be provided adequate incentive for retention in the HRD centres for a reasonable period. Work experience in training institutes should never be perceived as a minus point during promotion to the higher rank.
Like INTAN of Malaysia, all high-achievers in the civil service should be prepared to work at the training institutions on rotation or at intervals. Thus, in Bangladesh also, training institutes should be staffed with efficient, honest and brilliant officers with aptitude for and commitment to training.
Putting emphasis on training for attitude development is not enough. We have to respond to the global slogan "Professionalise or Perish," which implies setting up a training culture in every government office. But before that what is most needed is operationalistion of the training policy promulgated through an ordinance in 2003. The existing mismatch between training needs and training curricula, and between training and career development has to be minimised.
In the public sector, training is still considered a discrete event having little link with career development and promotion. Most of the training activities are classroom based and there is little scope for training on the job. To meet the deficiencies of the institutional training, practice of systematic on-the-job training (OJT) in all the government offices should be emphasised, and compulsory training on "Training of Trainers" (TOT) to all the supervisors of the ministries/directorates corporations should be carried out.
TOT is important as it is only through this activity that we can produce a new breed of supervisors who will nurture or nourish the new entrants of the civil service and who will be the source of instruction or sustainable learning on the job.
It is high time for us to ask what we have achieved so far by investing money in training. The achievement seems minimal because we could begin with the "self"; the "self" remained undiscovered, undeveloped. B.F. Skinner said decades ago: "Everyone should begin with himself." This never happened in the training institutes because behavioural science was never given importance, as is done in the developed countries.

Infusing democratic values
Almost all the previous governments concentrated mainly upon structural changes rather than behavioural ones. We saw that structural changes brought through decentralisation of administration at the grass-roots level in 1982 did not produce positive results because little was done to foster attitudinal change in the political and administrative actors.
Democracy is more a state of mind, and unless mindset is properly moulded, democracy cannot truly function. Mere rules and laws can hardly help if the attitude to enforce and practise them is not built correspondingly.

Dr. Syed Naquib Muslim, PhD, is a former Secretary, and is Director (Academic Affairs), AUB.