Civil servants are not a burden but the corrupted are

By Valter Vadivel

Trimming the public service sector certainly not a good idea for the government, given that the general election is not far away. Moreover, some of the political pundits are foreseeing the General Election to take place within this year! Therefore, going ahead with the laying off the so called non- productive civil servants could end up detrimentally to the ruling government. But of course our policy makers are not so immature to meddle with the livelihood of the civil servants at this very moment.

Mohd Sheriff failed to have a foresight

However, how could a former senior government official like Mohd Sheriff Mohd Kassim, a former Secretary General of Ministry of Finance comes up with such an idea. No doubt it sounded mature and for the betterment of the national coffer. But why at the expense of the civil servants at the lower levels?! Didn’t he know that they are the ones who become the dogsbodies most of the time?! Or didn’t he have the foresight to maintain a reasonable size of public service sector while he was in the office decades ago?!

As a former senior official he should have suggested the ways to improve the civil servants’ productivity not to sack them in abrupt manner. Is there any problem to slow down the intake of the civil servants instead of asking the current ones to quit?! Another handy solution is to take government employees on contract basis.

Wipe off the corrupted civil servants

Probably going hard on the errant civil servants- especially the corrupted ones would be helpful too. Many of the non-productive civil servants could be identified and fired if found guilty should the government launched a war on corruption. Economically speaking, these corrupted officials automatically fall under the category of non-productive civil servants.

What about Japan’s over bloated Civil Sector?

Let us not to compare ourselves with other countries. Even Japan has one of the highest numbers of civil servants with the ratio of civil servants to population of 1:28- Thanks to Institute of Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS). Don’t tell that Japan is not developed!

Civil Servants are not deadwoods

First and foremost try to quash the stereotypical view that the civil servants are generally deadwoods. They are equally contributing to the well-being of our economy like the rest of the Rakyat.

Besides delivering at the government departments, they also spend and comprise a big chunk in the local consumer market. In fact, they are part of the consumer market with a big purchasing power. Most of the local industries are thriving because of their purchasing capacity. What about their contribution to the local tourism?! In spite of this, they are also not sparred from annual income tax. And they are also paying GST since April 2015.

On my point of view, a large civil service doesn’t harm the economic wellbeing of a nation in long run given that the government taking the relevant measures to reduce the size of it by phase and by wiping out the errant civil servants.

The best economic practice

We should bear in mind that the best economic practice in the world is to distribute the fruits of the scarce resources as equal as possible among the subject of a nation, failing which, would cause other socio economic problems.

Caring government should be the order of the day

Adding to that, in the face of uncertain factors like technological unemployment where machineries increasingly replacing the humans and the influx of foreign labors, its certainly not advisable for the policy makers to cut off the numbers of civil servants abruptly. Thus, the government could also prove itself as the caring government and eventually win the people’s support.