Here’s how to get better service from govt servants

 

Government employees are getting a big pay rise. Good for them! The prime minister expects better performance from them. Good for him! We welcome the stern words from the premier public servant himself!

Following that, some government departments announced they’ll immediately improve productivity by extending their operating hours. Well, hooray for them, too – though some might say, gimmicky much, bro?

But if it works, then extend it across the entire bureaucracy, by which term I mean all government employees – and not in a pejorative way.

I’ll skip my usual whining about them. Some complaints are fair, as we know they are nowhere near good enough, but a lot of the complaints are just mean-spirited and unhelpful.

How we reward employees, whether through the tangible (pay, benefits, perks) or the less tangible (recognition, awards, titles etc), has a great impact in motivating them. The government’s pay rise should help with motivation, though what exactly they’ll be motivated to do remains to be seen.

Employees, whether in the private or public sector, have to deliver on certain expectations, defined by goals, standards, KPIs – the so-called deliverables. Employees and employers can end this arrangement through resignation or retirement, and also dismissal, retrenchments etc.

Mind your own rice bowl

No employee should ever feel their employers owe them a job. It’s our personal responsibility – not our employer’s responsibility, or the government’s, or anybody else’s – to take care of our proverbial 

periuk nasi

 or rice bowl.

Merely being government employees shouldn’t entitle them to preferential treatment.

Some believe the government has a social responsibility to employ people. That is wrong. If 

government money

 – from taxes, duties, fines, dividends etc, which are our collective wealth – doesn’t 

buy

 us the services we deserve, then those tasked with delivering such services haven’t fulfilled the 

amanah

 that’s implicit, and often explicit, in their employment contracts or oaths.

What’s often lacking in the bureaucracy is accountability. But to be fair, it’s tough to accept accountability when you’re just one of the thousands of minions carrying out the orders of powerful, possibly corrupt or incompetent, bosses and political masters who don’t really care about you.

Power in the right hands

If we want to build accountability, we need first to empower the civil servants.

However, in a society rife with malfeasance and leakages, empowering civil servants is risky and scary: think of law enforcement functionaries, issuers of permits and licences or those who manage big expenditures.

The answer? Devolve some of the monolithic federal power to regional authorities – the state and local governments. With strong central oversight through our constitution, laws, codes etc and strong enforcement and sanctions, this can work.

Even now, on matters such as land, water and Islamic affairs, we have a workable arrangement where these powers reside with the states but are exercised alongside the relevant federal powers. So, it’s not impossible for devolution to work.

Think small

Accountability then becomes more easily enforced when the bureaucracy is smaller. We can help things along by having local government elections, so the people can truly be empowered in return for being held accountable.

State governments are already held accountable through regular state elections. It’s not as if we never had any local government elections, either. We’ve had them in the past, so this, again, is not something new.

We also need to slim down the bureaucracy. Productivity, after all, is the relationship between input and output: the same output of services to the rakyat delivered by a smaller bureaucracy means better productivity.

We have one of the most bloated bureaucracies in the world, with a huge number employed in government jobs and many others in jobs with agencies or statutory bodies or government-linked or -owned entities, all paid for with government money.

It’s not sustainable. What happens if we can’t pay for the large and growing salary bills? The government would either have to borrow – debt which must be repaid later, with interest – or raise taxes, or reduce spending and subsidies, or do all of these.

This wouldn’t work out well for the rakyat.

Streamlining

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many Malaysians lost their livelihoods or savings or investments, and often all three. Least affected were government employees, protected from any negative impacts on their income and job security. They certainly can’t say the nation hasn’t taken care of them.

There are other solutions, too – streamlined laws and regulations; the use of more technology such as AI and other digital tools; privatisation of many services currently being run by the government; and privatisation of government-linked or -owned companies, which are often a drag on government money.

And certainly, deal firmly with poor performance and misconduct. Set up courts and tribunals to handle disputes the way they’re handled in the private sector. This is not rocket science.

You can’t pay competitive wages to a bloated workforce. But here’s the deal: if you cut down the workforce by 10%, you can give the remaining employees an 11% increment! A more extreme, and perhaps less viable example is to cut the bureaucracy by half – we can then double everybody’s pay!

Can the bureaucracy still run with a smaller workforce? Certainly.

But why aren’t we doing this? Simple. Successive governments have viewed civil servants as a reliable, if increasingly political, vote bank for them. While this has generally worked in the past, it can’t be taken for granted either, as we’ve seen in 2018.

Diversity and seniority

While we’re at it, address other issues too. For one, the bureaucracy is not diverse enough. It is overwhelmingly Malay, which is unfair to other Malaysians who want to serve the public. Besides, it’s not good for Malays to be so dependent on government jobs.

We must also focus on the quality of the employees, and insist on better management and leadership in the bureaucracy. We must do away with the current system that still rewards seniority over competence. In today’s fast changing world, such a policy is a barrier to excellence.

Hire mid-career people from the private sector. The reason that many don’t join the government is not just because of money, as some private companies pay less than the government, but also because of the fear of being discriminated against and drowned by a stifling and unfair bureaucracy.

We must also deal with the growing parallel Islamic bureaucracy that’s encroaching into the civil service. If I believed such encroachments could help produce a more honest, innovative and accountable workforce, I’d be in the front row of the cheerleaders. But it does not.

Bangladesh warning

I grew up poor. When times get especially hard, the poor – fishermen, farmers, odd-jobbers – make do the best they can. They can’t assume there’ll be rice in their rice bowl unless they put it there themselves.

While things have improved a bit, this feeling of being abandoned by those with power rankles me, even now. It bothers me no end that many poor and needy people are not being helped, because we’re spending too much money shoring up a swollen, inefficient and political bureaucracy.

We must be mindful of recent lessons from Bangladesh. There, a government that mollycoddled an increasingly privileged and entitled lot of public servants ran afoul of its own citizenry, to its detriment. I’m not saying that’s where we are, but that’s where we could end up.

Can all that I suggested be implemented? Of course they can. It won’t be easy, and we shouldn’t be asking for perfection, but we certainly can achieve improvement: the transformation will certainly enjoy broad public support.

All it needs is the political will. - FMT

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.

Editor’s note: Malaysia’s public services comprise the civil service as well as about a million people in the military, police, education service, health service, local authorities and statutory bodies.