Recently, a parliamentary committee had occasion to bemoan the falling standards of the civil service. Speaker after speaker wistfully recalled the days when the best and the brightest competed for the civil services and competence was their hallmark. Parliamentary diagnosis centred around what they termed an inept Public Service Commission, some of whose members 'had their own coaching centres'.
They did not say they themselves - the politicians - had something to do with the abysmal civil service performance. They would rather have them as henchmen than as guardians of law, wouldn't they?
They chose not to reflect on the falling educational standards that are beginning to tell on all segments and professionals - from doctors to engineers to the overpaid corporate managers.
It did not cross their mind that if you incessantly keep abusing someone you are unlikely to get the best out of them. Certainly, you won't attract the best, and most certainly not those with a modicum of self-respect. Without self-respect it is not public service but just a job.
It did not occur to them that an 'over-developed' establishment, with a finger in every governance pie and disdainful of the 'bloody civilians', makes sure the civil service qibla gravitates towards Aab Para?
So where does the Public Service Commission come into this, even if it is not the most virtuous or proficient of institutions?
In highlighting the quality at the intake stage the honourable parliamentarians got the wrong end of the stick. What we do with the civil servants post-selection is of far greater importance. Perhaps the Army is a good case in point. They do not necessarily look for the brightest at the intake stage but through rigorous training and building morale they develop ordinary cadets into good officer material. And they don't stop at training. They have the 'up or out' rule too: if you are not good enough to be promoted you are pensioned off.
By and large those selected to the various civil service groups are of fairly high quality, and we are told the quota system hasn't really been a show-stopper. Pathetic candidates, the ones who make headlines, never make it to the top 100 or so who get into the civil services. In that sense, the parliamentarian pique is more reflective of the plummeting standards of our college education.
The principal reasons why the Civil Services fail to measure up are easy to identify: training, compensation, performance management, and lack of respect - and the politicos in office wanting them to be at their beck and call, sometimes getting even for their times out of office when the poor clod was 'on the other side'.
What we gather from the several reports on civil service reform is that training is misdirected. In this age of robotics and artificial intelligence, the typical civil servant is still drinking from the fountain of the Raj. There may be a smattering of 'functional' training, but by and large training is generalist in nature. Computer literacy, ideology of Pakistan, Islamic history, basic economic issues - they are all relevant and necessary, but one would expect the entrants come equipped with such fundamentals.
But how do you do the training needs assessment of someone who doesn't know what his next job is going to be? Unless, of course, he is the amrat dhara, in which case he doesn't need to be trained - not even in the art of serving the people who pay for him.
The less said about compensation the better- unless you factor in 'rewards' of office, making the civil service a variant of the jagirdari/subedari nizam.
Performance management is an alien concept to the civil service. There are no agreed goals set out, and there is no proper system to appraise performance. You follow orders not the law - often not knowing the difference. The boss likes you, you are excellent; the boss doesn't like you, you find another boss. There is no forced bell curve to separate the brilliant from the mediocre.
Absent a proper Performance Management System you can never be held accountable. Cute!
When people pine for the caliber and commitment of civil servants of yore they tend to forget the respect that was extended to them. 'Bureaucrat' has now become an almost pejorative term - how the talk show anchors twist the blade by disdainfully referring to them as 'babus'! You cannot expect superlative performance from those who are constantly derided.
The widely held opinion is that the Army and the Judiciary are the only two 'working' institutions in the country. No genius is required to guess why they work and the civil services don't. It is all about political transgression. Army and Judiciary have claws; civil service has been defanged. The civil servants work at the 'pleasure' of their political masters. They neither have the security of tenure nor operational autonomy.
In the ultimate analysis good governance, the plaintive cry of all those who care, is predicated upon the quality of civil service. No matter how well meaning the political leadership it cannot deliver in the absence of a competent civil service. Equally, no matter how competent the civil service it will feel stymied in the presence of a vagrant political leadership. It is a symbiotic relationship with a caveat: if the civil servant kowtows to the politician in order to survive, he becomes a partner in crime; if the politician uses the civil service for political or personal gain, he fails democracy, making people look for alternatives.
The civil service deserves space, a greater role in managing its own affairs. Of course they are accountable to the people, through the political leadership, but a distinction has to be made between oversight and over-lordship. This will be best achieved through a robust Performance Management System where the civil servants are assigned specific goals and rewarded or penalized on the basis of results.
But competence and performance are not enough. If the civil servants want to be respected they will have to learn how to respect the people they are expected to serve. This will require an attitudinal shift. It is the potential to serve that needs to be assessed by the Public Service Commissions, and groomed by the training academies.
We need a civil service that is neither derided nor dreaded, a civil service whose corporate culture enshrines service not servility.
shabirahmed@yahoo.com