I am corrupt,honestly

 

By Syed Saadat | From the Newspaper Dawn

 

  THE number of letters to editors imploring the government to increase the upper age limit for appearing in the Civil Superior Services exam is one indicator of how coveted a career it is.

Around 10,000 people apply to take it, and of those around 7,000 have the courage to actually appear in the exam, which is considered to be the ultimate test of knowledge and nerves. Around 700 pass the written exam and at most 350 make it to the final list of candidates who are sent to the prestigious Civil Services Academy for the Common Training Programme.

The average age in my training programme was 27-plus years. This is the age at which the corporate world believes an individual to be his most productive in terms of output, and the latest trend is for CEOs to be in their 30s. It is this aging cream of the country that makes it to the CSA.

But the euphoria of being successful makes time fly, and a month passes by quickly. Then comes the shock: Pakistan’s civil servants get their first salary, an astonishing Rs10,000. Although they know about the amount beforehand, believe me when I say that actually getting it in your hands is, for all the wrong reasons, a different feeling altogether.

The media keeps complaining that bureaucrats are corrupt. I ask, do we have a choice? It is not a matter of choice but a matter of subsistence. If you don’t want your wife and children to starve to death then you have two choices as a civil servant: either don’t marry or don’t be honest.

Ironically, you also have to execute a bond to serve a period of three years after the successful completion of training. If you want to leave, which obviously comes to pass when you are squeezed by circumstances, then you have to pay a sum of Rs1.5m to the government. Can somebody define bonded labour for me?

Our old man, who has by now hit his 30s but looks 55, puts up a smiling face in front of the world because he was never a whiner. He was always a hardworking individual who believed in his abilities, otherwise he would not have managed to get this far. A paradox now grips his mind. The perception created by the media and society is that the bureaucrat is successful, rich and classy. He is somebody who drinks classy wine and smokes Cuban cigars. But the truth of the matter is that Haji Ahmed, the servant working in our home, earns more than I do and, I can bet, works a lot less. I am not pleading a case for Cuban cigars or classy wine, I have no interest in either. All I ask for is a respectable salary that can help me make ends meet.

I can sense that some of you are on the verge of tears after listening to the sob story of a Pakistani civil servant.

Hold on, I have an answer to all this. I am not going to present utopian solutions, such as that the government should revise pay scales in light of the recommendations of the Pay and Pension Commission. Given the pace at which the government works, I would be dead and buried by then. My solution goes as follows.

My fellows from the police service have plenty of options. Apprehending the wrong person instead of the criminal by receiving some gifts from the guilty party is a viable option for jacking up their income.

Customs is self-explanatory; a very lucrative deal would be allowing sophisticated sugar-mill machinery into the country without any duty and showing it as scrap. Inland Revenue Service? The wonderful citizens of Pakistan are so eager to evade taxes. You can help them evade Rs10m by paying a million to you.

A District Management Group officer has 25 to 35 patwaris under his jurisdiction and Rs10,000 a month from each is a piece of cake. After all, who won’t pay to avoid a discrepancy in land records?

Guys in the Information Group can have their share of funds meant for publicising government policies and creating a better image of the government; nobody will notice because this image stays the same and nobody cares about it either.

Railways has plenty of iron that can be sold to steel mills at cheap rates, provided they know who to pay. Deals bringing in defective locomotive engines can take you to a whole new level. Secretariat Group, the people who run ministries, can be the movers, shakers and decision-makers for shady power deals at the right price. Last but not least, the Foreign Service. There are plenty of funds for the welfare of expatriates, and when you are posted out of the country you yourself become the most deserving expatriate. If my memory serves me correctly, an Indian national was caught in the US with a Pakistani passport that he obtained for a few thousand dollars.

Lastly, I would like to suggest to CSS aspirants to please think twice before taking this route. And if you do decide to finally take the plunge, don’t have any doubts about being corrupt. A Chinese proverb goes, ‘If you want to feed somebody don’t give him food, teach him how to fish.’ The GoP does this to a civil servant; they teach you how to fish.

Going around in circles

By Syed Saadat| From the Newspaper Dawn

GIVEN the state of the writ of the state in Pakistan, finding civil servants with happy faces is a rarity these days. But lately I have found plenty of them.

There are a few pertinent reasons behind the happy faces, one of them being the Supreme Court judgment of Nov 12 on the petition filed by a civil servant, Anita Turab, for protection of civil servants. The judgment by the apex court emphasises security of tenure for civil servants, better measures to cease victimisation, so on and so forth.

The judgment, authored by Justice Jawwad S. Khawaja, goes to the extent of stating that “Civil servants owe their first and foremost allegiance to the law and the constitution. They are not bound to obey orders from superiors which are illegal or are not in accordance with accepted practices and rule-based norms.”

Then there is a more individualistic reason for the happy faces: 33 officers got promoted to grade 22 recently. Most of them are over the moon except for a few who feel getting so high up at this age might be detrimental to their health.

Being an optimist myself I would have preferred the company of the happier among the lot. But as fate would have it I bumped into someone who was not all that upbeat. One obvious reason behind the grumpy mood might be his impending superannuation. But the rest of the reasons were very thought-provoking and somewhat alarming.

“Do you know what and how I feel about this promotion?” he asked, as if insinuating that I should have taken the initiative to ask the question myself. Without waiting for my response he continued: “You must have seen an ox which goes around in circles to run the mechanical contraptions used for drawing water from a well or crushing sugar cane.

“That ox is blindfolded to ensure it keeps going without being distracted. I feel like that ox who was actually going around in circles but the blindfold made it believe that it was passing through exotic landscapes and travelling to some wonderland. But when they take the blindfold off its eyes it realises that it is standing at the same place where it was when it all started. The SC judgment, this promotion and impending retirement has felt like somebody has taken away the blindfold.”

“Wow,” I said to myself at the relevance of the analogy the classy bureaucrat drew and the essence of the conversation that followed.

Along with the recent approval of promotion of 33 civil servants to grade 22, Prime Minister Raja Pervez Ashraf has also approved comprehensive guidelines for streamlining the civil service in light of the Nov 12 judgment. Remarkable as it may seem, this is nothing different from the dozens of rules, guidelines, regulations and codes already present in the system, some of them as old as the first official activity of the East India Company in the subcontinent.

What we need now is not yet another guideline but reforms in the civil service which are surgical, objective and minimise the arbitrariness which has smeared the face of this institution.

The world has moved to standards measurable to decimal points in every field including sports, scientific research, university admission tests and even processing of immigration visas. Most readers must be aware of the scoring system used by Canadian or Australian immigration authorities.

Political influence simply cannot be exerted if laid-down rules for posting against a particular post are objective and measurable. For example, for a civil servant to be appointed as DCO Lahore, a degree in town management/law, a minimum of 10 years’ experience as town administrator, previous membership of a team which has completed a couple of development projects each worth at least Rs500m, service in at least two provinces of the country etc can be the prerequisites to be considered.

Similarly, if an ambassador to China has to be appointed then a degree in International Relations, fluency in Chinese language, a minimum of 15 years of diplomatic experience of which five should be in China can be the benchmark. The Inland Revenue Service, Pakistan Customs Service, Pakistan Post and Pakistan Railways can have exceeding revenue targets by 10 per cent in the last posting as a requirement for appointment to a more pivotal position.

What the Supreme Court’s decision or guidelines approved by the prime minister want to achieve can only be realised by formulating and implementing such standards.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel; what is needed is a will to put the wheel on the right track. Guidelines similar to the ones that have been present for decades would not serve the purpose. Keeping a check on undue pressures and undesirable influences on civil servants would seamlessly become part of the system when reform is directed towards inducing change through modern management techniques and tools.

An acceptance of change — that too not of a specific, final stage but an acceptance of the need for change as a permanent state — is a must.

Lastly, a comment by the senior bureaucrat whose self-critical appraisal inspired this article, about the dilemma our bureaucracy faces today: “Taking the blindfold off is not enough. You’ve got to make them see the goal as well, otherwise they will keep going around in circles.”

The road not taken

By Syed Saadat | From the Newspaper Dawn

ROBERT Frost’s poem, The road not taken, ends with the following lines: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.”

Had he been a civil servant he would have written “And I took the less risky one”, instead of “less travelled by”, because risk-aversion comes naturally to civil servants, just like poetry did to Robert Frost.

Risk-aversion is a tendency among civil servants to avoid situations that can put them in direct conflict with the power brokers — be they politicians, the military bureaucracy or their seniors. It is a global phenomenon. However, this aversion is accentuated in developing countries like Pakistan as situations requiring a response arise more often. Delayed decision-making, ambiguous rulings, conflicting orders nullifying each other, etc. are all forms of risk-aversion among civil servants.

The poor bureaucrat cannot be blamed for such an attitude as daring decision-making does not come naturally to a middle-class man who toils hard for years, first in the attempt to enter the proverbial ‘permanent’ government service and later at the lower levels of bureaucratic hierarchy. So, when our man reaches the top echelons of power his one and only consideration is to stay put. This metamorphosis of ordinary middle-class individuals, from a member of the public to a public servant to eventually the system’s servant is the story of all ‘successful’ bureaucrats.

Contrary to common perception, civil servants are not work-shy. They put in long hours to carry out their official duties ranging from providing the usually clueless minister with all that is necessary to run the show, to thankless jobs like maintaining law and order and of course, the mundane routine of implementing laid-down official procedures.

Being part of the state machinery in a state where the general inclination of the public is to make governing as difficult as possible is not an easy job and requires talent. The question is that if these individuals are so talented why is governance so bad.
The usual deduction is corruption; but the real reason is risk-aversion among civil servants, and the blame for that does not lie on them alone. The causes of risk-aversion are endless, ranging from systemic to social.

The system of appraisals puts so much in the hands of the seniors that a difference of opinion can be suicidal for a junior officer. There are hardly any independent and efficient checks in place to gauge the service of an officer beyond what his boss thinks — and that kind of predefines the winner of all arguments. None would risk his promotion by disagreeing with the one who is going to play a pivotal role to make it a possibility.

The most significant criterion for promotions is seniority. Other than the scenarios in road traffic, a junior civil servant usually can never overtake a senior, no matter how much the senior underperforms. Initiative, innovation and inspiration are not rewarded and might even backfire in cases when outdated rules and impertinent conventions are bypassed by an individual to get the job done swiftly. Later, they may come back to haunt, sometimes in the form of court petitions and at others in the form of departmental inquiries. This prompts civil servants to lie low and go with the flow.

Political influences are another cause of risk-aversion among civil servants. Saying ‘no’ to somebody who is in power takes a lot of courage and then being able to face the victimisation in the form of being transferred or made officer on special duty takes even more courage. Since gutsy individuals at the political level are nowhere to be seen, most civil servants just don’t risk it.

Civil servants are also restricted by anachronistic rules; service rules, code of conduct, secrecy act and what not. Times have changed but rules have not. In an era of media freedom, WikiLeaks and demand for laws for free access to information, our civil servants ironically are not supposed to talk to the media, write for newspapers, blog and, at times, even have an opinion.

Such bars are understandable in matters of state security but not all matters fall in that category. Notions of state security and official secrecy should not be used as a smoke screen to cover up malpractices. Actually, such rules are there to ensure that civil servants do not become whistleblowers. Given such preferences of the system, an upright individual finds it tough to rise to the top in the Pakistani bureaucracy and ends up feeling suffocated.

Lastly, a definite factor behind these risk-averse attitudes is the declining ‘esprit de corps’ among civil servants. Over the years, camaraderie has been eroded because of a number of factors — political inductions, military interventions, disproportionate remuneration and individual opportunism. This has resulted in the civil service becoming very weak as an institution.

It is said about pre-Partition ICS officers that such was their integrity and comradeship that it was very hard to victimise an officer who took a just stand as his fellow colleagues would stand by the principle as well as the individual.

Today, it is very hard to find an individual who would stand for principles and even if someone does rise to the occasion, his colleagues do not. Oligarchy has replaced camaraderie. Oligarchs stand for power, comrades for principles and that has made all the difference.

In the fitness of things

By Syed Saadat | From the Newspaper Dawn

SEVERAL decades ago, some members of the public were kept waiting for hours under Jacobabad’s scorching sun to see John Jacob, then the deputy commissioner of the town.

They wanted to request the powerful government functionary to address some minor administrative issues that fell in his domain. In addition to being a British government functionary, Mr Jacob was also an inventor and on that day, he became so engrossed in his workshop that he did not attend to visitors from the general public. Later, when he realised that he had failed to attend to his official duties, he was so filled with regret that the next day, he set up an office under the sun. The intention was to make the self-indulgent Jacob of the day before appreciate the suffering of the people who were forced to wait because of him.

Perhaps for this reason, when decades later it was proposed that the settlement’s name be changed to something more ‘pious’, as has been done to many other cities in this land of the pure, the people of Jacobabad opposed it. Perhaps this is why John Jacob’s grave in Jacobabad is generally afforded the status of a saint’s mausoleum.

The events narrated above took place many years ago, in an era when we were not independent. But 65 years after Independence, in recent days, a news item entitled ‘‘Desperado’ SP shoots youth over trifle’ appeared in the columns of this newspaper. A senior police officer had shot a youngster dead over a petty parking dispute on chaand raat. Such an extreme reaction is indicative of the psychological ill-health and stress levels of the officer.

Dig a little deeper and you find plenty of occasions that reflect insane behaviour on the part of both military and civil officials.

Last year, the then commissioner of Gujranwala Division thrashed the assistant commissioner of Narowal for the rather laughable reason of not getting a washroom cleaned in anticipation of a visit by the chief minister.

Recently, several officers of the Pakistan Army were jailed by a military court upon being found guilty of having links to the Hizbut Tahrir, a banned organisation.

Then, the propensity of army chiefs to topple elected governments is not exactly the epitome of psychologically stable behaviour.

When officers show such tendencies, the lower cadres are sure to be infected as well. One extreme example is that of Malik Mumtaz Qadri, the security official who killed the then governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer.

On a less conspicuous but equally pernicious level, causing losses worth billions to the government kitty for just a few bucks in one’s personal bank account must also be included in the category of deviant behaviour.

A colleague in the civil service described this as being greedy to the extent of “killing a whole cow just to put five kilogrammes of meat in your deep freezer and leaving the rest of it to rot.” Both the civil and military bureaucracies have been considered guilty of such deeds, from the dubious purchase of ships in 1994 to that of railway engines recently.

While differing in their circumstances and scale, these myriad examples serve to show how many of us can become highly insensitive and resort to irrational behaviour.

Why do civilian and military officials so often fail to resist the abuse of official power? Such cases of indiscipline are not because of poor grooming or the lack of proper training; the National Police Academy, Islamabad, the Pakistan Military Academy, Kakul, and the Civil Services Academy, Lahore, etc, are remarkable institutions. There is nothing wrong with their facilities, the training they provide or the principles they advocate. What, then, has gone wrong with government officers?

The answer is to be found in psychological health. Officers no longer take pride in serving the public; instead, they take pride in having cars as big as the house of a poor man and houses bigger than even his imagination. Another category of public officials takes pride in performing duties in the name of a skewed version of religion instead of official duties.

The solution to this mess is not simple, but one definite step towards it can be to focus on the psychological fitness of government functionaries. It is mandatory for both civil and military officials to undergo an annual medical exam; their physical health has to be in line with the duties they are supposed to perform during the year. Given the cases enumerated above, it would seem appropriate that officers be evaluated for psychological health and fitness as well; different categories of mental and emotional well-being can be developed just as has been done in terms of physical health.

In order to prevent the misuse of such a testing system, an independent, fair and transparent body of professionals from the field of psychology should be formed to oversee this; otherwise, given the level of sycophancy and nepotism prevalent in our system, such a body could create more psychological stress instead of helping reduce it.