Editorial
Public admin in disarray
Politicisation root cause
RATHER than contributing to efficiency and better performance, the recent spell of promotions has led to a top heavy and imbalanced public administration. Worse yet, many senior officials without work called OSDs, have become a constant drain on the public exchequer. At present the number of such OSDs from the level of assistant secretary to secretary is 343.
The fallout of such promotions based mostly on political consideration or favouritism is that against some 830 approved posts, we have now as many as 1694 deputy secretaries; 622 joint secretaries against 430 posts and 242 additional secretaries against 107 posts.
The officials so promoted against non-existent positions have thus been made virtually redundant and are in a state of limbo. This is a serious wastage of administrative manpower.
While the administration has swollen at the top, the lower stratum, especially at the assistant and senior assistant secretary levels, is suffering from an acute shortage of manpower. As a consequence, work at the field level is being severely affected.
All this points to an administration that is failing to deliver. The government cannot afford to continue this state of imbalance in the administration.
To put an end to the prevailing chaos and restore equilibrium and efficacy in the administration, the government should stress merit and seniority as opposed to political and personal bias in matters of promotion in the bureaucracy.
At the same time, swelling ranks of OSDs should be significantly scaled down to make the administration compact.
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