Building and sustaining a culture of excellence

THE JAMAICAN civil service has always been in a mode of continuous pursuit of a culture of excellence. Our challenge with every reform programme has always been sustaining the culture of excellence emanating from that initiative. As a young public officer entering the public service for the first time in 1991, one was taught the history of the Jamaican civil service, our pre-Independence culture, and our post-Independence culture.

As a support system to the Westminster style of governance, the Jamaican Civil Service prided itself on being the bastion of all things public sector and being so heavily rules-based, it was the most efficient bureaucracy that existed in the commonwealth. We were touted as being the epitome of the modern civil service, and heavy investment was made to ensure that that culture was intact when we gained Independence in 1962. Much of this was achieved through training our best and brightest and keeping them in the service.

These best and brightest citizens, civil servants, would boast that if it were not for them and the work they did, Jamaica would not have gained political independence, and so there was a certain aura about the civil servant in Her Majesty’s service.

Alas, we did not ensure we sustained the culture of the civil service, and this was exacerbated by the turmoil in the second half of 1970s and was also impacted by the conflicting political ideologies of that time accompanied by economic meltdown as a result of the external shocks that resulted from happenings in the global political economy – the Cold War.

The post-Independence civil service