The opinion and argument for greater efficiency in the Sri Lankan public sector have been a prioritised national topic for over seven long decades. The public service has been pressurised by the general public since its inception in Sri Lanka, but obviously without much success up till now. Boosting public sector productivity and creating a complaint-free service delivery requires evidence-based proof.
Soon after taking over office, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa declared that he intended to end public sector inefficiency during his tenure. On December 31, 2019, barely weeks after the election, President Rajapaksa highlighted the importance of efficiency and transparency in every state entity with a direct linkage to day-to-day public life.
More importantly, the President reiterated that the entire public sector must take the responsibility of restoring public faith and trust in their service. He added that unnecessary ordinances and regulations must be amended to transform public service so that the services provided to the public should be conducted without imposing an unnecessary burden on the people.
Good intentions
Regardless of the good intentions of the President, the public service has not advanced an inch from where it was for the past several years, but worsened further.
The same ordinances, rules, regulations, and circulars still prevail, hindering the masses. Not a single ordinance seemed to have changed or service was simplified. The same inefficiency, lethargy, and unenthusiastic approach to public issues by Government servants still remain in the vast majority of state institutions.
The overall efficiency has not changed for the past many years. The entire public service is evidently inconsistent, the staff is untrained, and the general attitude is anti-social.
It is true that time and again, consecutive Governments have made attempts to meet the challenges paused in the public sector. Despite such attempts, the moral and ethical benchmarks for public sector workers are deteriorating further.
The public service and its resources are meant to be used for the benefit of the common people of the country. The majority chunk of the tax revenue collected from the citizenry is consumed by the vastly overcrowded public service.
According to a recent statement made to the media by a senior Cabinet Minister, out of the total tax revenue of the Government of 1,216 billion, over 1,052 billion was spent on Government salaries and pensions in the last year.
There is no doubt that public service is important to a nation. It makes the state visible to the citizenry, forming a tangible link between the Government and its people. It is a process of establishing controls, authority, and visibility for the Government.
However, public service delivery is inevitably a highly political matter, even in developed countries, to a certain extent.
In Sri Lanka, historically, the public service was used by politicians, both in Government and in opposition, to fulfill political needs much more than common public welfare. For example, for the past many decades, successive Governments unnecessarily dumped their party supporters in the public service without any organised mechanism.
Promising Government jobs is a popular mode of collecting votes. Politicians promise Government jobs to supporters whenever an election is called and most often succeed in ‘pushing’ their supporters into public service arbitrarily, even when there is no actual requirement.
Even in this modern era where the private sector possesses many employment opportunities, habitually, politicians attempt to find jobs in the public sector for their henchmen.
The vast majority of them either have no sense of the job market or intentionally ignore the negative impact of overcrowding the public service.
According to this writer’s view, none of the public sector institutions has a systematic evaluation of manpower or mechanism to recruit. Most often, the recruitment is done at the whims and fancies of politicians, mainly based on pre-election pledges.
The new recruits are sent irrationally around the country to be assigned to duties that have no relevance to their qualifications or skills. They simply get on without any subject related knowledge or training, wasting public funds.
The total public service workforce is said to be approximately 1.5 million people in Sri Lanka. Media reports revealed that a recent survey found that efficiency among public servants has dropped to an astonishingly low of 30 percent.
Startling figure
This startling figure indicates that well over a million of them are time-wasters who spend public funds on living. Consecutive Governments and trade unions must take the responsibility for this enormous waste of Government revenue meant for public welfare.
The governance structure in Sri Lanka consists of five levels of institutions; national, provincial, district, divisional, and village. The administrative system functions under a centralised system. The system, however, is found to be complex and eventually leads to inconveniences for the general public, particularly at the grassroots.
Various reforms were introduced by successive Governments, time and again, with the assistance of international agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, to improve public sector performance. Regrettably, that goal has not practically been achieved as of today.
Instead, the whole system has become a source of corruption, nepotism, and degeneracy. Despite the high priority given by successive Governments to public service delivery, the quality of services declined further in terms of accessibility, efficiency, and sustainability.
Public sector trade unions play a pivotal role in inefficiency in the Government service. The common public belief is that the public service is inundated with corruption and malpractices. However, even a slight disciplinary action by the administration of any Government institution is defied by the so-called unions and often seeks union action. Unlike in the private sector, disciplinary action on public complaints about service inefficiencies is non-existent in the entire Government machinery.
Regardless of the type of complaint, whether it is corruption, abuse of funds, misconduct, or any other accusation, the trade unions, most often without warning, pursue trade union actions such as strikes, protests, or demonstrations.
Unfortunately, in Sri Lanka, irrespective of the magnitude of the public inconvenience, provisions for legal action for both the Government and the general public are limited.
Media reports recently exposed that there were 1016 protests and strikes that took place in 2021. Also, in January 2022 alone, there were 99 such trade union actions. One can calculate the loss of man-hours of the activists and the common people who were affected to fathom the financial loss to the country.
Despite being a monetary burden to the country, constant strikes and other trade union actions have hindered public life for many years. Public servants mercilessly inconvenience the masses, not only by stopping work but also by disturbing the peace on the streets by organising protests. The public’s reaction is extremely hostile, but they too are helpless.
Key cause
The key cause of the public sector workers’ inefficiency and mediocre work ethics is the attitudes that were in practice for a long period of time. From the management perspective, skills and knowledge can be trained, but a good work attitude is subjective and seemingly exceptionally rare in the Sri Lankan public service.
Those who seek public service employment do that because of the perception that Government jobs are stable, easy to execute, and require minimal supervision and accountability. Also, most of them rely on the pension available after serving in the public sector. Hence, they overlook many opportunities and benefits that exist in the private sector.
Unlike in the private sector, when a Government institution recruits an employee, the interviewers hardly focus on the attitudes, skills, and most often, even the knowledge. Either they are recruited through stereotype examinations or through recommendations from politicians. Therefore, in the first step itself, the public service neglects the opportunity to recruit proper employees to its cadre.
For multiple reasons at this point in time, the entire state sector is despised by the vast majority of the citizenry. If someone conducts an island-wide survey on the efficiency and attitudes of public servants, the result will obviously be a huge disappointment. Restoring trust and faith seems a far cry from what is expected from the public service.
As President Rajapaksa stated, the benefits offered to public servants can only be enhanced by strengthening service delivery. Therefore, every public servant has an unquestionable responsibility towards the requirements of the general public, and they must be treated as assets that pay for their living.