26 July - 1 August 2001
Issue No.544
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 26 July - 1 August 2001 Issue No.544 |
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Development, not unemployment
In an exclusive interview, Minister of Administrative Development Mohamed Zaki Abu Amer clarifies some basic distinctions
"I am not the minister of unemployment. I am the minister of administrative development. My legal, constitutional and social duties are to modernise the government administration and make it capable of dealing with the developments of our time; and to make the administrative apparatus capable of helping the state in implementing its development policy which is opening up the potential for increased [private] investment which will, in turn, create job opportunities," Minister of Administrative Development Mohamed Zaki Abu Amer told Al-Ahram Weekly.
Minister Mohamed Zaki Abu Amer presents his case to the Weekly photo: Sherif Sonbol
Abu Amer could not be more keen to make the distinction, now that he has become the focus of public wrath (see related article). The distinction is important because the mandate of the Ministry of Administrative Development and the man at its helm is to streamline and modernise, and to try and deal with the large numbers of dead-wood government staff-- a mandate, one would think, that would be at odds with hiring more employees.
Sitting behind his desk at the ministry, a two-storey building sandwiched tightly between the imposing structures that make up the Ministry of Planning, Abu Amer explained that, in light of the huge problem of unemployment faced by the government, he had taken the initiative of making a list of specialisations and departments suffering a shortage of employees and announced openings in these areas. "But it is true that the government administration is overstaffed," he said. "Because of mal-distribution of labour, there are some areas that are overstaffed and others that are understaffed."
Simply redistributing labour is not an option. "I cannot, for social reasons, move my labour force from one area to another," Abu Amer said. "If I attempted to do this, such a policy would meet with great social resistance. So my hands are tied. I can only solve the problems of understaffed areas by taking on new staff. So the idea of announcing 170,000 job openings [covering specialisations from veterinary medicine to social services] was, on the one hand, to staff specific government administrations, and, on the other, to help indirectly in solving society's great problem -- unemployment. Solving unemployment is secondary in my case. My primary concern is to staff the government sector properly."
And hence the job profile, including age restrictions, required of those applying for any of the 170,000 jobs. "When a minister of administrative development is up against choosing employees, his constitutional duty requires that he choose the proper elements. That is why we had clear requirements for those applying for the jobs," Abu Amer said.
It is imperative, as far as this minister is concerned, that the government sector not take on any more redundant staff. "The greatest problem we face is unproductive labour, and to be short-sighted and say people need to be employed, and, therefore, I will create jobs for them, is like being cold and jumping into the fire to get warm. When you have false employment and administrations are overstaffed, tasks are atomised and it takes much longer to get something done because, instead of going to one person, you have to go to five. Also, a department head cannot properly evaluate his staff because no one is really doing a job, and so promotions are indiscriminate. Socially, however, it is not possible to make these people transfer to other jobs or to get rid of them. And so we must wait until they leave their jobs for natural causes or retirement, or some such."
In the meantime, the ministry is pushing retraining programmes, which cost LE2.08 million in the year 1999- 2000. Abu Amer admitted that, on the whole, the educational system did not churn out usefully-skilled people, and solving that problem, he argued, required a long-term overhaul of systems beyond the ministry's reach. "So we must deal with the current situation," he said.
Further, programmes to make jobs more financially rewarding had been put into place in the past few years. "We increased the annual raise on basic salaries to 10 per cent in 1987, and so an employee's basic salary has increased over the years by 200 per cent," Abu Amer said. "Also the incentive was increased to 25 per cent of the basic minimum salary. Last year, I put into effect a promotion system that covered everyone, including many employees who had spent more than three years without promotion. But it is a huge problem. Today there are 4,700,000 government employees. To increase their salaries by only one pound a month would cost the government almost LE5 million monthly. See what a huge amount it is? Already the salaries for this sector account for a third of the budget."
It is no small job, and with the conflict between rationalising staff and increasing unemployment it is not about to get any easier. We had better leave Abu Amer, then, to get on with the day's work.
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