Our civil service

Our civil service

There can be no question about the validity of Vice President
Try Sutrisno's recent call for young and bright Indonesians to
dedicate themselves more to their country's civil service.
"Facing the increasingly heavy challenges of the future, the need
to develop human resources in various fields ... must coincide
with the acquirement of high quality people in the bureaucracy,"
the Vice President told participants at the Indonesian Hindu
Youths Organization congress Friday.

Obviously, what prompted the Vice President's call was the
country's unquestionable need for quality personnel to deal with
the increasingly complex matters the state administration
confronts day to day. A simple example of this is the affect of
recent identification checks on people from Bogor, Tangerang and
Bekasi who work in Jakarta. They had to endure a frustrating few
days recently just because they lived in one area and worked in
another.

One might be tempted to dismiss such inconveniences a
bureaucratic mix-up that has to be endured for the sake of
administrative order. After all, the regulations are there to
justify the raids. Better coordination was all that was needed.
That may be true. But the areas that surround Jakarta, known as
the Jabotabek fringe area, act as buffers to soften the impact of
urbanization in the capital.

An estimated hundreds of thousands of people from Jabotabek
commute daily to and from their jobs in Jakarta. Clearly,
preventing these people from being at their posts when they were
needed could have an adverse impact on offices and companies and,
therefore, the nation's economy.

One could be philosophical about it and argue that such
bureaucratic mix-ups usually occur only in the bureaucracy's
lower echelons. And indeed, our impression is that most of the
human resource improvements are to be done at the lower level
where officials must deal directly with the public. But this does
not distract from the gravity of the job at hand.

Considering all this, it is indeed sad that the present trend
for university graduates is to seek jobs in the private sector,
rather than in the public service. This is a reversal of the
trend that prevailed a decade or so ago, when polls indicated
that young educated Indonesians preferred civil service jobs,
considering them more prestigious.

What brought about this reversal? Low civil servants' pay may
be a factor. But given that wages in the public sector have
always been much lower than in the private sector, other factors
could be at work. After all, the polls indicated that young
Indonesians in the past preferred civil service positions despite
the low pay.

What other factors could be at play? It could be that the
prestige of public service positions has declined in the eyes of
young and well-educated Indonesians. Or perhaps the impression
that the civil service does not appreciate individual creativity
enough.

There could, of course, be other reasons. Our point is that it
is worth looking into these questions if the civil service is to
attract well-educated bright young Indonesians. There is no doubt
that an improvement in the quality of human resources in the
public sector is needed as we prepare for the challenges of
future.