During the election season, we see impossible promises, comfortable figures, candidates who become instant experts on any topic and analyzes where reality is usually the first victim. But a few days ago I found something I didn’t expect.
An academic with a PhD published a column whose title suggested that public servants were about to lose their jobs. As a person who has dedicated a good part of his professional life to public service, my reaction was immediate: what is happening? Are they going to end their administrative career?
I began reading with genuine interest, trying to understand the seriousness of the matter and, why not, identify how I could contribute to preventing such a problem from occurring. My surprise was capital.
The discussion was not about public employment, nor about an administrative career, nor about the protection of merit in access to the State. As I continued reading I had the feeling that the title announced one thing and the text spoke of another. What I found was a distracting sophistry: an argument constructed to generate concern around a sensitive topic while the author avoided entering into a much deeper and, above all, much more uncomfortable conversation.
The discussion we should be having is how we build a more meritocratic, more transparent, more efficient State with better results for citizens.
Because the underlying discussion is not whether the State should spend more or less. Nor is it whether it should have more or fewer officials. That is an attractive simplification in the campaign because it forces one to choose sides quickly, but it does not help solve the country’s real problems. The discussion we should be having is how we build a more meritocratic, more transparent, more efficient State with better results for citizens.
We should talk about the quality of public spending. There is a tendency to assume that any reduction in spending is necessarily harmful and that any increase is, by definition, positive. However, citizens do not live better because an entity executes one hundred percent of its budget. Citizens live better when there are concrete solutions to the problems they face every day. The relevant question is not how much is spent, but what is achieved with what is spent.
An education system can consume enormous amounts of resources and still produce low levels of learning. An entity can expand its staff without improving the quality of the services it provides. Defending public spending without talking about efficiency is as simplistic as asking for cuts without analyzing their consequences.
We should also talk about how to improve control in public affairs. Colombia has built a complex institutional architecture to monitor the use of public resources. We have control bodies, audits, management systems and multiple instruments designed to prevent irregularities. However, the perception of corruption continues to be one of the main concerns of citizens.
That should lead us to critical reflection. If after decades of strengthening control mechanisms, citizens continue to perceive high levels of corruption, it is evident that something is not working as it should. It is not about eliminating controls or ignoring their importance. It’s about asking ourselves if we are controlling what really matters. Perhaps we have devoted too much energy to verifying procedures and too little to evaluating results, confusing formal compliance with public integrity. And perhaps the time has come to recognize that an effective control system is not the one that produces the most reports, but rather the one that manages to prevent, detect and correct irregularities in a timely manner.
