I REFER to the announcement by the Chief Secretary to the Government, Tan Sri Dr Ali Hamsa, that appropriate steps will be taken to rehabilitate 5,000 recalcitrant public servants whose performance score had gone as low as 60 per cent.
He stressed that no immediate action would be taken to terminate under-performing employees. Instead, they may need to attend retraining courses or be transferred to other departments before they are given an option to quit.
Would such lenient action be able to rehabilitate this group of employees?
Before I retired three and a half years ago as a senior executive of a private company, I had been dealing with various government departments for more than three decades. As a patient person, I managed to get most applications, renewals and other statutory approvals without much delay.
Except in some instances, my overall experience in dealing with different levels of civil servants was pleasant. In most instances, I had to be patient and willing to do more follow-ups before approvals would finally be granted.
While having a chat with a civil servant over coffee recently, he was not at all embarrassed to tell me that the overstaffing situation in most government departments is rather unsustainable.
He said in jest, “Four persons would be employed to handle one person’s job”.
Obviously there is an excess in the civil service workforce and the extent of this excess is indeed worrisome. For the past couple of decades, the excessive public payroll costs were somehow absorbed by the attractive returns earned from our crude oil production. How long can our depleting crude reserves support these enormous recurring costs?
Unless we compare our civil servants-to-population ratio (CSTPR) with our neighbours’, we wouldn’t know how we fare in managing our country’s human resources.
According to 2009 figures, in percentages, Malaysia had a CSTPR of 4.68; Singapore 1.40; Thailand 2.06; and Indonesia 1.79.
Overstaffing has a high tendency of causing procrastination among complacent employees while, at the same time, it may cause a vicious cycle that has an adverse impact on the overall productivity of the entire department. Sick leave and absenteeism will unavoidably be on the upward trend.
Effective measures must be taken to address the excessive civil service workforce in our country before the situation goes out of control like what happened in Greece six years ago. The latest calculation of our CSTPR shows another hike of 0.65 per cent to 5.33 per cent (1.6 million headcount/30 million population).
While I totally support the implementation of the highly unpopular Goods and Services Tax on April 1, our government has to take another bold step to trim the excessive workforce. Increasing revenue without trimming excess cost isn’t the right direction in which to go.
We shouldn’t wait for a serious economic crisis to erupt before taking drastic action, similar to those taken by the Greek government to lay off 180,000 staff by this year so as to revive the economy. By then, those austerity measures taken to fix a serious crisis would not only cause a lot of pain to the nation, but also delay our goal to achieve developed nation status by 2020.
A wise and responsible government has to be proactive and far-sighted.
Patrick Teh,Ipoh, Perak