EDITORIAL: It’s taken its sweet time, but finally the government has realised the need for at least “considering” hiring experts from local and international markets into all economic and technical ministries “to replace the existing generalist cadre of federal secretaries and their immediate subordinates”.

The idea is to create an “efficient and modern government structure”, one that is capable of guiding the country out of the mess it is in.

This is the kind of idea that you wouldn’t expect the government to come up with on its own, that’s why it’s no surprise that, according to a leading local daily, “international lenders working with the government on structural reforms have recommended adopting best international governance structures in which bureaucrats serve as facilitators to the private sector based on research and data-based decision-making rather than creating trouble through their control and power”.

First of all, this is a tacit admission that the country’s bureaucratic structure, in its current form, is simply incapable of meeting its many current economic and financial challenges.

In fact, long decades of experience have shown that it does indeed produce “generalists”, at best, who are not experts in any field but rather prefer to exercise their power over permits and approvals to slow down all sorts of processes, especially those, like facilitating foreign business, that the rest of the world has learned to fast-track.

It turns that the Special Investment Facilitation Council (SIFC) has also realised that the present-day bureaucracy is simply not up to the task of taking the country forward; hence the decision, after all these years, and involve the private sector in management of the most important economic/technical ministries.

Yet this process is not likely to be very smooth, and the reason, once again, will be the civil service.

For, you can bet that senior bureaucrats will not readily line up to play second fiddle to private sector management, which is exactly what they should be required to do, so it should not be long before they find novel ways to throw a monkey wrench in the works.

Yet they are government servants at the end of the day and should be well aware of penalties in store for defying direct orders right from the very top.

The government must, however, be very careful about the incidence of conflict of interest.

There’s no point in shaking the system and hiring private sector management only for them to put their own interests above state’s.

Needless to say, then, that official due diligence will have to be up to the mark, much like it is done in the private sector that the government is looking to tap.

There’s no doubt that employing data analytics and setting regular benchmarks is the way to go in much of the world in the 21st century.

We have only ourselves to blame, of course, for allowing the bureaucracy to continue running on the 19th century model left behind by the raj, where the obsession with pen and paper, not to mention files with laces, still takes precedence over digital transformation that can no longer be avoided.

Our governance structure and principles should reflect modern advances. Policy decisions like inducting private sector experts into key ministries should have come a long time ago.

But now that we are moving in the right direction, the next big challenge is implementing them in the correct manner.

That, in itself, will be a big test for the government because it will determine the entire trajectory of the exercise. Hopefully, it will not be too long before we start to see changes and results.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2024