One of the things that this country sorely needs to achieve its goals of raising the rate of economic growth to create opportunities and jobs, is a civil service corps that is focused and able to deliver effective and efficient services. Many regular people would tell you that they dread a visit to a government office to request for service. They know that nine times out of ten, their encounter with a public officer is bound to be tedious.
Once you get there you do not only have to contend with queues and red tape but less than friendly service staff. The service providers are simply not driven by results. So whether they provide good service or not, has no bearing whatsoever on how they are compensated. After all their wages, at the end of the day, are guaranteed. Other rewards such as promotion are largely influenced by how close or likeable one is to the boss.
As an added advantage, you are better off subscribing to some unofficial club in a little but strategic corner of the civil service to improve your prospects of career advancement. There was a moment when having had a stint in rural Botswana as either a District Commissioner or Council Secretary would propel you to the higher echelons of the civil service. Another enduring route is to spend some bit of time at the Ministry of Finance and then move over to the Ministry of Trade for accelerated promotion. And surely there must be more of these clubs in other ministries and government departments across the civil service.
So our civil service is not only unwieldly, humongous but hardly a meritocratic place. It is a place where they can effectively and knowingly defrock you but still allow you continue to draw a salary just to see out your contract. That’s how wasteful they are with our hard earned tax money because their priority despite all these public pronouncements about improving productivity, remain hollow.
As a result of the above, Botswana scores poorly in the World Bank’s doing business rankings. And what does the civil service do to ameliorate such poor showing? Instead of working at real and tangible reforms, they choose to skirt around and then pin their hopes on coaching the private sector to answer survey questions favourably.
In 2019 , the same World Bank also found that Botswana’s “students score low on international and regional assessments (e.g. Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and South and Eastern Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality (SACMEQ) and low quality holds back the desired expansion of senior secondary education because of high failure rates on the Junior Certificate Examination …”. And most of the students are in public schools
Because we judge a tree by the fruits it bears, these then are the results of our civil service. And sadly this is not where we are focusing our energies. Instead, we face a simmering push by civil servants and their trade unions to allow the former to run businesses. As to where a workforce which is already fundamentally beset by poor productivity will find the time to balance their obligations to day jobs and running businesses, defies logic. This would amount to a day light breach of good governance. Ominously, we are being asked as a nation, to sanctify the amendment of labour laws and thereby facilitate a breach of a covenant between the government as the employer and civil servants.
Any opposition to having civil servants running business because they are regulators is demonised as an attack on their freedom of association. However this is a fallacious argument because nothing prohibits them from leaving their government jobs to go into business. . All they seek to do rather is game the system with insider information. They want to abuse their status as civil servants to run such business on their employer’s time. And inevitably they are bound to abuse other resources such as government office space, telecommunications, transport and stationery. We would then end up with a corrupt and unproductive civil service.
