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.