Now Or Never
Entering
the civil service is no longer an alluring career choice for the talented young
men and women of this country
By Raza Rumi
A little news item that appeared a few weeks ago
was ignored by our all-knowing analysts and TV channels. Reportedly, the
Federal Public Service Commission failed to recruit all the vacancies that were
advertised for the CSS competitive examination held in 2007. Out of 290
available posts, the number of successful candidates in the 2007 CSS
competition was merely 190, leaving almost 100 vacancies unoccupied.
Last year, too, the government could not get enough
number of successful CSS candidates to fill in the available posts and 47
vacancies could not be filled. Such instances have occurred before but given
the state of unemployment this is, to put it mildly, shocking.
The truth of the matter is that entering the civil
service is no longer an alluring career option for the talented young men and
women of this country. Perhaps, the greatest damage to the attractiveness of
the civil service came in the wake of the devolution plan that rendered the
most coveted service group -- District Management Group -- unpalatable. Within
days, the district administrators had no prescribed career-paths and that they
had to be subservient to small time political cronies of the central political
elites.
But this would be too simplistic an explanation.
The last decade has also witnessed
The almost sinister destruction of the DMG and the
centuries old office of the district magistrate or its historical predecessor,
the mansabdar, was ahistorical and reflected the petty tensions within the
Executive where the rival services viewed the DMG as an unfairly privileged
elite service. The martial mind viewed the DMG as an alternative power centre
that needed to be neutralised for effective capture
of civilian institutions.
Today all the major civil service training
academies are headed by former army men; and most poignantly the civil service
reform unit in
It is ironical that opportunities for rent seeking
have multiplied under the newly devolved structures. The District Coordination
Officer, the new avatar for the erstwhile Deputy Commissioner, and his staff
have a wider menu of commissions and kickbacks along with the political
honchos, thereby defying the faint possibility of electoral accountability. The
testimony of this comes from none else than former Chief Minister Punjab. It is
therefore not the lack of 'extra' income that has made DMG unattractive. It is the
loss of the unique service culture where the DC and his team functioned as
relatively neutral state agents, mediated between the citizens and the state;
and could potentially resist political influence.
From the citizens' perspective, two immediate after-shocks
haunted the local governance patterns. First, the reconfiguring of the 'system'
led to an unbridled and unchecked police force interacting directly with
citizens with remote, little supervision. Second, the absolute collapse of
local citizen interest regulation, which evolved over 150 years of governing
experience. There are two to three hundred local and special laws, ranging from
price control to natural resource management (water, irrigation and land) and
from public health (adulteration, hygiene etc.) to environmental protection
(forest, wildlife, pollution etc.). This is not to say that prior to 1999 the
police was supervised effectively by the district magistrate or local
regulation was optimal or efficient. In fact, decades of politicisation
of civil service had resulted in ugly distortions of the so-called 'system.'
If the old system was not delivering or a colonial
relic there were other ways to handle it than to throw out the sick baby with
the bath water and usher in multiple patronage seekers and distributors. After
all, civilian administrations in
Whilst these systemic tremors were felt by the
citizens in whose name a reform was imposed from the top, the provinces felt
completely bypassed thus reincarnating the old demons of troubled federalism.
Services such as health, education were meant to improve. Whilst the budgetary
allocations went up, the results were nowhere to be seen as the provincial
secretariats appropriated more powers and local rent-seeking replaced the
earlier patterns of malfeasance.
The much touted system of police accountability
through the public safety commissions was a still-born concept. It never took
off at the local level as the nominees to these institutions were selected along
party and patronage lines thereby eroding the capability of these bodies. Where
this Commission showed some teeth, its members were the first ones to bear the
brunt of police excess. The naivete of appointing the
provincial police officers through a panel, desirable as it is, and ensuring
that he (indeed they are all men) completes his tenure foundered at the rocks
of provincial politics.
The lure of raw power was reflected in the group
allocation preferences that the CSS candidates indicated from 2000 onwards.
Joining the Police became the top priority of those who appeared in the
competitive examination followed by Customs and Income Tax. It was the Customs
group that for some time became the prized service under General Zia ul Haq
when the society ought to have become more spiritual in the face of a heavy
dose of dubious 'Islamisation.' Alas, the monetisation of 1980s; and the brutalisation
of 'governing' have been the direct results of these authoritarian spells.
Things have come to such a pass that there aren't
enough qualified candidates, in a country of 170 million, to fill in the
entry-posts. If on one hand, this trend betrays the decline of institutions, on
the other it spells doom for the future of
There is no alternative to increasing the salaries
of the civil servants and making the promotion policy and work-environment more
attractive. Otherwise, it is a dangerous trend that has already set in.
However, it is nor irreversible.
The political parties are now calling for a
revision of the devolution system and the monstrous possibility of another
disruption looms large. Another 'revolution' will further lead to systemic
jolts and ensue painful period of transition that might fuel the current
climate of instability. There needs to be a two-pronged strategy: implement
civil service reforms at the central level and fix the gaps of the local
government systems with attention to the way provincial governments set policy
and supervise local bodies. The solutions are well known to all and sundry and
there is no need for another Commission or a white elephant body to carry the
changes through.
If only the political parties (and corporate media)
would halt posturing, stop targeting or extolling individuals and focus on
institutions. The prospects of this happening are remote but this is a fast
changing
Raza Rumi is a freelance
contributor. He blogs at www.razarumi.com; edits a
cyber magazine Pak Tea House & Lahore Nama blog.
Courtesy: The News