Staffing our civil service

Staffing our civil service

It is public knowledge that many people have been paying their
way to get into the civil service for a number of years now. No
one finds it ironic that a person is willing to pay millions of
rupiah -- the equivalent of several years of income for an
upstart civil servant -- for the privilege of working in the
public sector.

When Suryatna Subrata, the chairman of the Civil Service
Corps, made an unusual admission recently that money was often
exchanged in the recruitment process at the Ministry of Home
Affairs (of which he is secretary general), the news elicited
little media interest. It attracted even less public discourse
than one would have expected of an issue that in other countries
has all the makings of a national scandal.

The whole country, it seems, has accepted it as a fact of
life. Most people are resigned that little can be done about it,
in spite of the unusually frank admission by a top insider.

The prevalent attitude seems to be that what matters most is
that the government works, and the civil service gets the job
done. Whether this is done efficiently and effectively has never
been an issue in this country. Of even less concern is the civil
service's recruitment system.

A public sector job in this country has always been popular.
Not very long ago in fact, it was the job everybody -- from the
brightest to the least bright and the crooked -- wanted to get
into. Security, power, career prospects and a relatively good pay
were factors that drove people to muscle their way into the civil
service. For every single job opening, there were tens of
thousands of applicants. They resorted to whatever means were at
their disposal to get into the civil service, some using their
intelligence and talent, others using money and connections.

Like everything else that is at a premium, a civil service job
became a commodity, the price of which was determined by market
forces. In this case, jobs went to the highest bidders. Other
jobs went to those with "inside connections". It is known that
recruitment by connections enhances the power base of some
government officials, especially in regional administrations.

That this situation has existed virtually unchallenged for
many years and that the government has continued to deliver the
services, means there are still truly skilled and dedicated
employees among the crooks in the civil service. But can we
expect this to continue into the next millennium?

The rapid growth of the private sector in the last decade or
so has changed many people's perceptions about government jobs.
The private sector now offers equally attractive if not better
career prospects and security, and certainly more money. More and
more young university graduates are making the private sector
their first and only choice. They do not even give the public
sector a second look. As the private sector competes for the
nation's brightest, it is increasingly depriving the public
sector of its traditional supply of talent and intellectuals, but
not its crooks.

The public sector has lost many, though not all of its
glitter. The salary it offers is fast falling behind the private
sector. The starting salary of a new civil servant with a
university degree barely matches the official minimum wage levels
set by the government for the private sector.

Given all this, the question now is can we really afford to
remain indifferent about what is happening to our civil service
and the way it has been recruiting its staff? It is simply
unthinkable to predict what kind of government we will have in
the next decade or so if the administration is led by people who
joined the civil service by crooked means.

Many nations in other parts of the world are now actively
"reinventing" their governments to make them effective and
efficient to deal with the challenges of the 21st century. In
Indonesia, reinventing our government must start with the way we
recruit our civil servants.