GANGA / Sharda Ganga
The government has a staff shortage, I read Star News and glanced at the calendar. No, it wasn’t April 1 anymore for a long time. How is it possible that with almost 50,000 people employed by the government we still have a staff shortage? LVV Minister Noersalim says that this is partly because people leave the service, but also because they continue to grow. Cleaning ladies progress to become administrative assistants.
That almost sounds like the statement we attribute to Jopie Pengel, like ‘a route becomes a forest path, a forest path becomes a walking path, a walking path becomes a road, a road becomes…etc’ (I still don’t know if he actually said this).
Of course there is nothing wrong with people who continue to grow. On the contrary, it is very beneficial for them if they prove themselves, take initiative, demonstrate that they can do more than what they are given to do. But has that actually been the case with all those advanced interior carers, gardeners and drivers? I highly doubt it.
We all know examples of lightning-fast promotions. Enter as an interior designer or driver and the next step is immediately a policy officer or policy advisor. As long as the party color is chosen well, your career will be fine.
Minister Noersalim is looking, also at other ministries, to fill the vacancies at LVV, but he seems to be getting nowhere there too. Worse still, several ministries seem to have the same problem. There are people, but not the people who need them.
I know I’m not saying anything new, but let me say it again anyway’for the people in the back’. We have systematically destroyed our government apparatus. For years, positions were not filled based on what was needed or what someone could really do, but on the basis of loyalty. We have created a time bomb and are now in blisters. We hear ‘capacity problem’ left and right, and every five years plans are made to strengthen capacity. We borrow money from the IDB, receive money as a gift from the United Nations and provide training, invest in people and after five years they are sent home again, or put on a side path to languish there, and the story starts again.
We know what needs to be done, but we don’t do it. We still think capacitance is like Maggie’s cube —you can add it to your soup and everything will be fine. But you cannot simply add capacity strengthening, you have to organize it, protect it and deploy it in a targeted manner. It has to be ingrained in the system, it has to be a culture. And if it is a culture, then you will automatically stop with those political appointments.
As long as the system of political interpretation does not change, we will continue to invest in people for positions that they can never really perform, because they have no mandate to make real decisions, and from which they are removed after five years, to make way for the next people whose capacity needs to be strengthened again.
Our problem is not a shortage of civil servants, but a shortage of courageous political choices.
