Rebuild civil service integrity
A NEW Government has taken over Putrajaya and the civil service should welcome it with open arms as it heralds the beginning of a new administration and public governance.
Instead of the feeling of euphoria to work for the new Government, the civil service is now enveloped with trepidation and uncertainty due to the performance of a few senior officers who failed to observe the cardinal rule of neutrality in discharging their duties. The fallout from this failure is a tainted image of a civil service that is suffering a trust and credibility deficit.
Since independence, the civil service has served the old administration uninterrupted for 61 years. In the process, it has established a close relationship between civil service and ruling political party, and created the impression that the ruling party is synonymous with the Government. The cohesiveness has inadvertently created confusion among civil servants who are unable to make a distinction between a political party and the government of the day.
Consequently, some civil servants even assume that the ruling political party and the Government are the same entity. This confusion was clearly evident when a top civil servant pledged his loyalty to the former prime minister at a concert organised in Langkawi on May 8 to disrupt a political gathering.
The domination of a strong ruling political party has subju gated the civil service to become subservient to their demands of ‘who gets what, when and how’. The cohesiveness of this closeknit group cultivates a strong team spirit that unconsciously creates a culture of groupthink and its decisionmaking process demands blind obedience to political power.
Under such a framework, conformity is the norm, and there is no room for dissenting views or alternative opinions. The officers who have dissenting views or oppose a decision are more likely to get a transfer order.
The suppression of opinions and creative thought may inadvertently lead to poor decisionmaking and inefficient problemsolving solutions. This is due to the removal of check and balance as well as an internal controls mechanism that is integral for managing with integrity, transparency and accountability.
Consequently, it opens the floodgate to allow the practice of nepotism and cronyism based on patronclient relationship of ruling political party to dominate in the every spectrum of management in the civil service.
Once the practice of nepotism and cronyism is embedded in the civil service, it leads to poor public governance. It ushers in an era where the civil service is involved in mismanagement, abuse of power and corruption, and these misdeeds have derailed the delivery system to the rakyat.
It is sad that the patronclient relationship has been institutionalised in the civil service. Many officers are lamenting that the current practice of promotion of officers to the higher grades seems to favour those who pledge their support and blind loyalty to certain officers. The patronage system rewards the officers for their support and loyalty to their bosses, and in return they are assured of accelerated plump promotions.
The unfortunate outcome is incompetent officers are promoted while the excellent officers who are honest and dedicated but do not have ‘patrons’ are denied promotion opportunities.
In the long run, the promotion of wrong officers will undermine the leadership quality of the civil service to helm and manage the nation’s limited resources efficiently with integrity and accountability.
The new Government, with its clarion call to eradicate corruption, provides an opportunity for the civil service to reclaim its glory and image. The challenge ahead is to rebuild the civil service as an independent and transparent institution in order to regain trust and credibility.
This task is now entrusted to the majority of civil servants who are still discharging their duties with excellence, governance and deliverance to the rakyat. Let the ‘fear of God’ and conscience be the moral compass to guide civil servants to serve the new Government of the day without fear or favour.