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Madagascar |
STRUCT. ADJUST.
Under the pressure of donor organisations, the public services are being reformed
About a year ago, the government set up two practical committees for this purpose — the first for public service reform and the second, a committee to determine how personnel in the public services could be used. The whole aim was to study public service policy. The government and these two committees first of all wanted to find out exactly how many people are employed directly by the State — the number is far from being clear. The Public Service Ministry speaks of 134,000 officials while the Budget and Finance Ministry comes up with another figure completely different from the survey conducted by the two committees. So how many people are on the government’s payroll? 125,000?, 134,000?, 145,000?.
However, according to the Public Service Ministry, there’s not an overabundance of officials in Madagascar — the only thing is, they lack proper training and they’re badly organised. The fact is, in certain government departments, the needs exceed the number of personnel available to fill necessary posts; in other places it’s quite the contrary. Moreover, because of the lack of efficiency and «tools» to do the job properly, the whole work- output is affected. The Public Service Ministry stresses that the reform’s success will depend on the managerial staff.
What’s happening
In all the ministerial departments, serious shortcomings have been noted in the way these departments are organised and in the way officials carry out their work. They seem to have never heard of a code of professional ethics, one out of five speaks the «Queen’s English» more or less correctly. Office discipline is quite unsuitable for current needs; office administration is obsolete, dating from yonks. And when you consider what any modern State has to do, then its easily understandable how the public services fail to measure up to what they’re intended for. Its proving impossible to control, inspect and check on what’s happening.
Three reasons are given to explain the sad state of affairs in Madagascar’s public services: Rules and regulations governing the way things are run are completely out-of-date and quite incoherent for the average official, and existing Codes of Work Ethics have never been brought into line with modern circumstances; the law’s governing the existence of the State seem to be little better than slogans; government officials are unmotivated and frustrated.
The Civil Servants’ Union is well to the fore when it comes to the question of salaries and this has become a major bone of contention between the unions and the government. Opposition politicians especially have called the government to task on this issue. Madagascar’s civil servants are among the least well paid on the African continent, and this obviously is one of the reasons for laxism, corruption, absenteeism, in short, the running down of the general public administration.
Excessive centralisation of the public administration prevents national development and sometimes leads to harmful consequences on the socio-economic level. Taxpayers don’t mince their words when it comes to talking about civil servants’ behaviour. Corruption is a festering wound in all the State services. According to a 1999 survey, 85% of consumers admitted to having given money to civil servants.
O.K. Salaries are a main problem but there’s also the lack of public-spiritedness and lack of discipline which can’t be ignored. And the fact that politics play a major part in the public services, destroys their image. Becoming a civil servant no longer has the attraction it used to have. Salaries are small; workers either sit in their offices twiddling their thumbs all day because they don’t know what to do with themselves, or they’re completely overworked; the governing party has too much to say in what goes on in the civil service; equipment is completely unsuitable for what has to be done.
The party in power seems to have complete control of the Education Department (Primary and Secondary) with its 40,000 employees spread throughout the length and breadth of the island. The same goes for the Interior Ministry, and this, ever since Independence. In fact, these two ministries play a major role in the ruling party’s strategy. Recruitment must be among the President’s relatives, and it’s made clear to every official thus recruited, that he/she is there for one purpose — to win votes in the elections for the ruling party. Worse, even the Armed Forces are tarred with the same brush in spite of having a different status from the civil servants. Now there’s not only talk about «bogus» civil servants but also «bogus» servicemen. A leakage from the Finance Ministry has brought to light the fact that salaries for a thousand non-existent service personnel have found their way into the pockets of certain senior army officers.
How to bring about some kind of reform
In the midst of all these carry-ons, Madagascar’s donors have made it clear that some kind of reform of the whole public service system must be carried out. To be more objective, they carried out audits and surveys in five specific ministries and reviewed the results with the donor organisations. The ministries put under the spotlight represented 75%-80% of state-employees. The ministries thus closely examined were: Justice and the Budget (over which the State has clear control); Health and Education (a priority for any government); Public Works (leading to increased production and development in the private sector). It was clear that something was very wrong in all these public service departments. The present Constitution foresees that more power will be devolved to the provinces and this will necessarily lead to decentralisation in the public services.
Reorganisation on such a major scale implies that a detailed investigation must be made into what human resources are available and how they can be used. Likewise, the material and financial resources available. Salaries must be raised and this can only be achieved by a better system of tax collection plus an efficient control over public expenditure. Everyone knows that such reforms will take time and there will be all sorts of problems along the road.
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