Civil service needs to push ahead

THE Government workforce is vital for the functioning of Zimbabwe, as well as being a significant factor in pushing the country forward and ensuring that it not only grows but that it grows in the desired directions.

For a start, a lot of the basic services are provided by the State through its workforce: most education and most of the health services are in the public sector, and so the teachers, nurses and doctors are on the Government payroll and, incidentally are easily the two largest groups in Government employment.

Everyone is very happy there was a bumper harvest this year, with another one expected next year. But underpinning that and ensuring that the efforts of the farmers were not wasted, as well as ensuring that those who were not farming did not get the inputs, are the large Agritex staff complement, who trained the farmers in the new production systems and then certified that they had made the initial steps, plus the other group of financial workers who had to make sure the money required at each point was there, and was properly accounted for.

The list goes on, but as President Mnangagwa said at the funeral of former chairperson of the Public Service Commission Dr Mariyawanda Nzuwah on Sunday, the civil service and the related services under other commissions, on which the PSC chairman does sit to ensure a standard is kept throughout, there is a large professional and generally hard working block of staff.

In fact the Government is the largest single employer, although everyone else combined does hire a lot more, but the sort of standards that required, and even part of the mindset that is required, have to at least match those in the private sectors.

The old colonial idea that the civil service was a place to put those who could not get a “real job”, and even the idea that at times prevailed in the old dispensation that the civil service was a way of supporting relatives of powerful people or rewarding the loyal, have long gone. These days the civil services have to be top grade. There is laid out in the theory. Government employees are there to implement Government decisions and policies. But it is not that simple and never has been.

For a start a lot of Government policies come up from the civil service. To take one example, the recent decision to push hard on a more production and business orientation in education. A group of political leaders did not design Education 5.0. It was designed and built by professionals, some of whom have been battling for decades to get the required changes.

Political leaders liked the idea, through it was just what Zimbabwe needed, and finally gave the support and backing that was required to implement it. It was pretty much the same as with the conservation agriculture that has done so much to push up yields. Again we have experts, many on the Government payroll, pressing for this and showing exactly how it can be done. Again we have political decision makers taking the plunge, giving the go-ahead and finding the resources.

The process developing, approving and implementing a policy goes back and forth between the professionals and the decision makers, each adding to the concept as it moves forward until we have something that fits the country’s needs and, just as important, works and can be implemented.

Some things do not change much, and once a functioning system is in place it tends to remain. Obviously everything can be re-examined.

Again there is that need to match the professionals and the political decision makers. A lot of people stuck in a passport queue or seeking some other Government service complain about inefficiency. Sometimes they are right, and it is not very wonderful civil servants. But more often it is a 1920s system being used in the 2020s. The solutions can be worked out, but it needs the political leadership to at least take the plunge, and very often to do the initial prodding.

For a lot of these Government services, the magic formula ICT is mouthed by those who neither have to plan it or pay for it. The Second Republic, as just one of its umpteen number of reforms, is pushing ahead with e-Government, which gives the people a better service and allows the civil servants to do their job better.

This requires, in fact, a highly co-ordinated effort that has to be directed from the top if all the bits are to fit together and those bits include quite a lot of things that many do not think about. This is one reason for a lot of legal changes about to go through Parliament to ensure that the records in an e-Government system are accurate, which is mainly administrative, and that the data cannot be misused, which is definitely political and legal.

When President Mnangagwa was calling for a change in mindset he was talking about something that is already starting to happen. People are not being asked to carry on as before; they are being asked to make the systems work better, but only as a first step, and are being asked to think hard about how systems need to be changed to create systems that can deliver the quality that people demand.

Once again we come back to the PSC and what Dr Nzuwah was doing. A lot of that work was instilling the concepts of quality and innovation, but also ensuring the right people were in the right posts, and that the right training and support was available. This requires all those modern ideas of measurement and the like, which have helped the private sector so much, but also a willingness to see the civil service as a flexible and responsive machine that can do its job.

The President touched on the need to support and compensate civil servants. Like the rest of us they have found that there are no quick fixes to improving incomes besides making sure the whole economy grows. Attempts to take short cuts in the private sector lead to bankruptcy and closures, and in the public sector led to inflationary spirals, where all gains were very short term before the inevitable disaster, and nothing real.

The Second Republic reforms have ensured, across private and public sectors, that any future gains will be real. And the Government has been backing promises with action. Once the fiscal reforms and balanced budgets were in place, and everyone took a deep breath, the Government has been pushing up salaries and finding new benefits, rather than new promises about benefits “next year”.

Put very simply as tax revenue rises the civil servants get their slice. While the Government is never again going to print money to meet the payroll, on the other hand it has been more than ready to channel the full percentage of the tax revenue budgeted for staff benefits to the staff. More critically policies like ensuring the civil servants have the proper tools. Everything from decent hospital equipment, through Agritex motorbikes to schoolbooks, is seen as vital. Generally our civil service is good and getting better, thanks to Government support. That progress needs to continue.