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.