THE civil service needs some serious reshaping. Put in management consultancy language, it needs reimagining. Explaining to the public through town halls the reasons for the misdeeds highlighted in the Auditor General's Report and what is being done to plug the loopholes is one such measure.
But this is putting the cart before the horse. There have been a few town halls in the not so distant past. If town halls are seen as a game-changing deterrence to losses in public funds, then this way of seeing things needs a revisit. Remember the town halls of 2014 and the ones that followed thereafter?
If they were truly a deterrent, then why do losses and wastage of public funds keep happening? The latest Auditor General's Report is proof enough: RM681.71 million involving six government programmes have vanished into thin air, not to mention the RM21.35 million in public funds buried in wastage.
Not that the current and previous AGs didn't recommend any measures to plug the loopholes. They did, yet the losses and wastage have acquired the persistence of pestilence. But town halls are not without benefit. It ups the pressure on senior civil servants in whose domain such losses and wastage occurred while keeping the public informed. At least rumour mill won't be on overdrive.
But neither keeping the public informed after the fact nor shutting down the rumour mill is going to reshape the civil service. Reshaping means starting all over. Or put differently, it means beginning at the beginning. In such a reimagined organisation, there must be no room for errant civil servants.
Civil servants must be held to account. To keep them in while tweaking the public service here and there is to do disservice to two groups of people: one, the honest and hardworking civil servants and two, the taxpayers. Plus, the errant officers are a cancer that will destroy the nation. It is of national interest to abscise them.
But there seems to be a reluctance to do just that, perhaps motivated by the belief that civil servants have some safeguards provided by the Federal Constitution and procedural guarantees under their employment contract.
The belief is true only to a certain extent. Civil servants do not have a blanket security of tenure, say lawyers. This is because they hold office during the pleasure of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong or the ruler or the governor.
Yes, there are safeguards, but they are not what lawyers would say "absolute", especially when it comes to civil servants who are guilty of misconduct, irregularity or negligence. The RM681.71 million losses and RM21.35 million wastage of public funds last year, and the many millions lost and wasted over the past few years, are certainly due to misconduct, irregularity or negligence. These offences must not be dismissed with a slap on the wrist.
Transparency International Malaysia president Dr Muhammad Mohan is right in saying that a culture of responsibility seems to be lacking in the civil service. "Responsibility" and "accountability" are two sides of the same coin. One isn't possible without the other.
The only way to make both happen is to punish the guilty. With both in place and good governance entrenched, only then can the civil service be said to be a truly reimagined one.