Dismissals not transfers!
The writer is an international development professional, based in Islamabad
Last week, while addressing a ceremony on the second anniversary of the citizen portal, the Prime Minister asserted that the portal will help identify the bureaucrats who aren’t performing. These bureaucrats will then be outright dismissed from service and not just be transferred to other posts.
But does the PM really need the citizen portal to assess which bureaucrats don’t work or which ones are corrupt? Identifying the corrupt and non-performing civil servants is not as hard as it sounds. General reputation, peer feedback and intelligence reports provide ample details to identify the black sheep and deadwood of the bureaucracy. A large fraction may fall in the grey area, but there is a small yet sizeable percentage of bureaucrats, about whose reputation there is a consensus.
If identifying the black sheep and deadwood in bureaucracy is that easy, then what prevents the government from taking action against them? Does the government have enough powers to do that?
The PM has recently approved changes in the Civil Servants (Efficiency & Discipline) Rules 1973, but even before these amendments, the rules provided wide-ranging grounds for imposing a penalty on civil servants including an officer being inefficient, guilty of misconduct, being corrupt, or even carrying a reputation of being corrupt, or for living beyond means. The major penalties included compulsory retirement and removal or dismissal from service. Yet these penalties have never been imposed on scores of bureaucrats who are well known to be corrupt or for never moving a finger.
Accountability of civil servants is not a wholesale business. You cannot apprehend each and every civil servant for every wrongdoing that they commit. Bureaucracy is a large machinery and white-collar crimes are hard to trace. That is why the way to go is to identify the most corrupt and inefficient cases, make them an example and set a precedent to discourage others. Disciplinary proceedings under the Efficiency & Discipline Rules require a much lower level of evidentiary standard than what’s needed for criminal proceedings. Yet, over the past many years, the successive governments have failed to identify and penalise the most corrupt and inefficient elements in bureaucracy.
A little introspection can reveal that most of these commonly identified black sheep (corrupt) have enjoyed the most prized postings in any political era, while the deadwood (inefficient) has quietly kept on moving up the ranks. But this should hardly be a surprise. The corrupt rarely work in isolation and mostly form an integral part of powerful lobbies. Over their entire careers, they oblige the high and the mighty, deepening their political affiliations. On the other hand, the inefficient ones hardly take any significant decision, on which they can be caught.
The PM’s seemingly unforgiving tone is a manifestation of his and the entire political leadership’s frustration about the inaction of bureaucracy and the delay between the decisions they take and their implementation on ground. Bureaucracy’s inaction could be attributed to multiple reasons such as vested interests, lack of capacity, shortage of budgets, archaic public sector systems and processes, unrealistic ambitions on the part of the politicians, or even fear of undue accountability.
But a harsh political tone or some procedural change in the E&D Rules can hardly fix any of the above problems. The weakness of civil servants’ accountability framework does not lie in procedural delays and instead in a culture of tolerance towards inefficiency and corruption, coupled with political conveniences.
If the PM is committed to weeding out corruption and inefficiency, perhaps the way to start is to identify the most notorious and most inefficient civil servants and use the powers under the E&D Rules to fix them. Start from the top and work your way down. This might send the right message across the rank and file.
Published in The Express Tribune, December 8th, 2020.
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