Bureaucracy battles

A country’s public service is integral to its development aspirations. Sri Lanka’s public service has been so mismanaged it has become largely ineffective and has led to the current administration attempting to establish additional units in an effort to get it working again. But this should not mean an end to reform. 

One example of this is the Budget monitoring unit under the Finance Ministry. The integral duty of the Finance Ministry officials is to monitor implementation of the Budget while ensuring its transparency and accountability by presenting accounts and other updates in a timely matter. The fact that a new unit has to be established indicates the existing frameworks are failing to function adequately, forcing the Minister to establish new units to do a duty that should already be done by existing staff. If the Government does not have a capacity to independently evaluate policies to be included in the Budget then the honouring of public interest can fall by the wayside.   

Perhaps the most significant indication of this stagnation is the move to establish new courts or specialised high courts to hear corruption cases. The policy, which is expected to be presented to Cabinet next month, comes after nearly three years of efforts to push ahead with high-profile cases and while the Government may find this to be an adequate shortcut it is an indication of a calcified judicial service that the administration is challenged to reform. Establishing new courts should not deter the Government from attempting to reform the existing system and trying to make it affective across the board. 

An additional issue with taking shortcuts to public sector reforms is that the changes may not last unless they are embedded into the public sector in a sustainable manner. The danger of ad hoc change is that once the officials move on, as they eventually do, the differences they have made are undermined by political interference, or worse, negligence. The sheer number of public servants in Sri Lanka has left little room for methodical scientific recruitment, leaving the public service short of crucially skilled personnel.       

Sri Lanka’s State and State-Owned Enterprise workers, including the military, grew a whopping 30% to 1.47 million from 2006 to 2016, according to a survey by the Census and Statistics Department. The survey showed that not only is the public sector inflated but it often made recruitments to areas of little use to the people.  

Finance Ministry data showed that 88,000 ‘development officers’ had been recruited to the State service between 2005 and 2015 but only managed 11,000 medical officers, 33,000 nurses and 3,579 midwives. Politically-driven recruitment is clearly a major problem within the public service and continues to be a fiscal liability, especially since each year around 30,000 workers become pensioners. 

For a country to achieve its aspirations the public sector must play a key role. If policies cannot be formulated inclusively and scientifically, if legislation cannot be progressive and implementation timely and effective, and if public officials cannot be accountable then national aspirations are likely to remain unachieved. 

Such a country risks stagnation while the rest of the world moves on. This is the greatest danger that Sri Lanka has to work against but one they cannot win without an efficient public service.