Civil service reform, a forgotten agenda

Riyadi Suparno, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Civil service reform is not a new notion here, but has verily been forgotten amid reforms in other sectors following the fall of the New Order government.

In fact, civil service reform has been attempted several times since the Soeharto era, but its implementation has been hit-and- miss.

During the robust economic growth of 7 percent per annum in the three decades before the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, Indonesia did not feel the need to reform its civil service.

Worse, the authoritarian regime of Soeharto used the civil service as an instrument for social and political control. In fact, the bureaucracy had become powerful enough to create a bureaucratic polity -- a bureaucracy for itself.

The deficiencies of the public sector in general and civil service in particular have been documented and discussed in a number of studies, including those by the World Bank and lately by the Asian Development Bank.

These documents reveal the downsides of Indonesian bureaucracy, including the disconnection of the civil service from society, a hierarchical and patrimonial working culture, a lack of public accountability and massive abuses of public funds and corruptions.

Indeed, the country's civil service has been rated by the Political and Economic Risk Consultancy (PERC) as one of the worst in Asia.

In fact, there had been individual attempted reforms here and there under Soeharto, but there had not been any concerted efforts to reform the civil service.

Since the 1970s, Cabinets have included a minister for administrative reform, but not enough headway was made.

The latest attempted reform in the civil service after the fall of Soeharto began in 1999 with the amendment of the civil service law (Law No. 8/1974) by Law No. 43/1999.

This attempted reform did not stand alone but was strongly tied to an economic reform program under the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which entered the country following the financial crisis in 1997.

Unlike in other countries which were under the tutelage of the IMF, civil service reform in Indonesia, however, has not been part and parcel of the reform package demanded by the IMF.

Rather, it was a by-product of the massive decentralization program, which has been pursued vigorously since the passage of the decentralization law, Law No. 22/1999, which has been amended into Law No. 32/2004.

In fact, the decentralization law itself lays the grounds for partial civil service reform.

Under decentralization, local governments are now delivering a far greater range of public services -- in fact all services are decentralized except a few such as security and defense, foreign affairs, fiscal and monetary policy, the judicial system and religious affairs.

Local governments are also responsible for the planning, budgeting and managing of those services. These require them to reorganize their organizational structures to deliver their new functions as well as to accommodate new staff members transferred by the central government.

The decentralization law requires a fundamentally different way of managing the civil service. Decentralization requires the transfer of more than 2.1 million civil servants from the center to the regions.

The law also gives the regions the authority to appoint civil servants and to assume a number of personnel management functions in accordance with nationally approved norms and procedures. Implementing regulations issued later elaborated on these devolved functions.

On top of the decentralization law, the amended civil service law addresses specifically civil service management issues, encompassing the decisions on norms, standards, procedures, formations, appointments, civil service resources quality development, transfer, salary, allowances, welfare, discharge, rights and obligations.

The law mandates the establishment of a Civil Service Commission to assist the President to formulate policies on those management issues.

It confirms the regional government's human resource management functions and stipulates the establishment of Regional Civil Service Agencies as the lead agencies for human resource management at the regional level.

However, the content of this amended civil service law retains much of the control at the top, at the central government. The implementing regulations issued later confirm this.

This law and the implementing regulations followed the prevailing perception of the civil service as a kind of -- as Prijono Tjiptoherijanto termed it -- "national glue" of this diverse country.

But this law alone does not drive civil service reforms. The implementation of the law itself has never been comprehensive. This is understandable due to several changes of government in a relatively short period of time, i.e. four governments have come and gone since the reform era started in 1998.

Worse still, there has been little pressure from donors on the new governments to pursue the civil service reform agenda initiated by the previous governments.

The evidence of this could be cited from the fact that out of 24 Letters of Intent and their accompanying Memorandum of Economic and Financial Policies -- which describe the policies that Indonesia intended to implement in the context of its request for financial support from the IMF -- only one signed in September 2000 lightly addresses the issue of civil service reform.

Moreover, out of the last five annual donor meetings convened by the World Bank, only the meeting in December 2003 addressed civil service reform in greater detail.

Toward the end of the reform program under the IMF, Megawati Soekarnoputri issued in September 2003 Presidential Decree No. 5/2003 on the Economic Policy Package in Conjunction with the Completion of the Government's Program with the IMF -- better known as the White Paper -- which also contained reforms in civil service.

The White Paper places emphasis on increasing the transparency of public services. To achieve this, the White Paper envisages the drafting of a bill on public service, the publication of public service delivery standards and the move toward e- government.

The President had in fact issued Presidential Instruction No. 3/2003 on National Policy on the Development of E-Government.

But, entering 2004, these initiatives ran aground as the country was too busy with various political agendas, the legislative election and direct presidential election. No efforts had apparently been made to further attempt to reform the civil service.

Now, hopes are again ignited as Indonesia has a new government, with a strong President -- a President directly elected by the people. We hope this time, the President will be bold enough to set in motion the comprehensive reform of the civil service.