When I was an undergraduate
student at Makerere University, private companies like MTN, Halliburton, Total
E&P, Delloite, EY, Rift Valley Railways, PWC and KPMG would come and do
recruitment drives towards the end of every academic year. Of course you had to
have a top class degree (expected) to stand a chance with their HR people and by
the end of the year, most students graduating with top honours already had a
placement in one or even more of these companies. I kept asking myself; if all
the top students are being taken by the private sector, what will the civil
service remain with? Don’t government ministries and agencies need people with
first class degrees? These companies always benefit when they have bright and innovative
people on their staff but wouldn’t everyone benefit more if we had our most
skilled people in government service? Wouldn’t our infrastructure be much
better? Wouldn’t doing business be much easier? Wouldn’t paying one’s taxes be
a much smoother experience? Would people still have to suffer painful ordeals
at public offices yet more innovative staff would have made things simpler,
more effective and efficient?
Most of us dread dealing with
public offices, and not without reason. Often times, getting things done for
you at a public office may depend more on who you are or who you know than the
fact that you deserve to be served well by the person that is paid to do the
job! And I am sure we all concur that the general way of doing things is so
outdated the speed so slow. You’ve seen those offices where they have several
rooms storing old paper files and a member of staff has to spend over two hours
looking for your “file”! We mostly have a sick system that is also filled with
embittered staff who not only often feel powerless to change anything, but also
unwilling to initiate any positive change.
One of the major pillars of any
economy is the civil service. Have a crooked civil service and everything else
will suffer. Have a lean, effective, fast and efficient civil service and everyone
will be happier. You have better infrastructure and doing business becomes
easier, coupled with a better social services system.
I believe that one of the major
reasons why the Ugandan civil service is ailing behind and dragging everything
else with it is because we have no serious vision and structure of attracting
and retaining top talent to run our public offices. And I am not speaking of politicians
here though they could be an example. I mean, look at the CVs of people chosen
for cabinet positions in other countries that do better than us and you will quickly
see the pattern. We cannot just assume that things will work themselves out
automatically. That would be throwing our future, and that of our children to
the dogs.
I strongly believe that if we are
going to do things better, we need to deliberately make efforts to retain the
best of our brains and deploy them in the civil service. The world is highly
competitive and the same investments, tourists, trade deals and resources we
want are being clamoured for by 195 other countries. If we must succeed at the
global stage, we need to have people with wit and sharpness that can match that
of our competitors. This competition is no longer only in the private sector
but is now in the public sector too. What with all the multilateral
negotiations over wars, natural resources and trade deals between countries?
You simply must have the smartest guys on your side of the table to win!
We need our brightest people
teaching in schools and inspiring our children into a well-tuned workforce. We
need our brightest people in ministries to drive innovation in each sector of
the economy. We need our brightest minds in every government agency; URA, UIA,
CAA, UCC to mention but a few. People who will not just seek to maintain the
status quo but will continuously look for ways to make things better.
I am not naïve to think that this
can happen overnight but if you ask leaders from Singapore, they will tell you
that this was one of the cornerstones for their development. We must make a
deliberate effort and we must start right from the early years of our children’s
lives if we want a better tomorrow. Pupils must learn that it’s good to be working
for the state, not because of the “permanent and pensionable” mentality but
because you get a chance to make life easier for your fellow countrymen.
Talented students should be identified without regard to their background and
sponsored to the best universities using state resources. It pays in the long
run.
This extends even to African
students who get opportunities to study in Europe and America. I often ask
myself; why should the US be the one to require me to go return home after a
degree program in any one of their universities when my home government doesn’t
even care? Who needs the skills I would have earned more? Who should in fact be
demanding that I return home? Are there any home-driven efforts to track
Africans graduating from the world’s top universities in the diaspora and
persuade them to return home? Do our home governments know how many students
are being given scholarships, by which countries/organizations, where and for
how long? This isn’t the case with most African governments and they are silent,
despite the grave consequences of the prevalent brain drain. One would say that
we benefit from the remittances by those in the diaspora but I can assure you
that on any one given day, money will always follow good brains. Take those
brains home and the money will follow suit. And besides, money alone doesn’t
solve problems but good minds do.
With all the competition, will the
talented accept to work in a crippled civil service with low wages? The jury
might still be out on this but I have witnessed that people can sacrifice money
if their other needs are met. Give
them a conducive work environment with the freedom to innovate and contribute to sustainable
development. Sometimes, that satisfaction is worth more than money. Of course,
we can debate more about whether civil servants are getting what they really
deserve and whether we can afford a higher public service wage bill or not but
that will be for another day. No problem doesn’t have a solution if we don’t
give up and this is just one of them. I am not giving up.
0 comments:
Post a Comment