14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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Fixing the government
The deterioration of the government apparatus in Egypt and many states of the Third World results from bad management and economic regression. When academic research demonstrates that more than half those employed in government institutions are redundant, and that half the aggregate costs of such institutions are due to official working time wasted, it becomes clear that the policy of appointing tens of thousands in the government sector every year requires reconsideration.
The study, to which the Academy of Scientific Research, the Al-Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies and the Ministry of Managerial Development contributed, suggests five pivots for reform, requiring the existence of a Supreme Council for National Administrative Reform, which must receive sufficient leeway in executing the necessary tasks.
The first pivot concerns revising the organisational frameworks of managerial units, along with their subsidiary divisions within each ministry or institution.
Clearly, such revision will be met with violent resistance on the part of high-ranking officials in the context of what one Arab expert calls "the conflict of bureaucratic empires," which has caused a great deal of cancerous expansion in Egyptian bureaucracies.
The second pivot relates to classifying and liquidating more than 24,000 laws, decisions and recommendations dealing with the work process in the government sector, as well as introducing legislation that makes the dynamics of reward and punishment, including dismissal, more flexible, since employment conditions have reached an unprecedented stage of complacency.
Then comes the third pivot, which concerns personnel and human resources. Performance rates have been plummeting steadily, owing to the accumulation of redundant positions and the absence of training; and reform in the field of employment, in this particular respect, will face difficult choices. The private sector has failed to generate work opportunities, and a certain proportion of those employed in it have tended to abandon their posts in favour of government-sector employment. There are, too, discrepancies in salary rates within the government apparatus as a whole (the bourse vs the statistics agency, for example).
The fourth pivot addresses the dire need to renew the predominant culture in government organisations. Over time, destructive values have accumulated: "it's only government money," "you get what you pay for," "whoever works a lot makes a lot of mistakes" ... Modern research shows that employee participation in decision-making and planning achieves higher productivity and profits. For the boss to meet regularly with his or her employees also improves performance and revitalises the work environment.
The fifth pivot aims to prevent the wasting of resources, and tackles the question of how to limit expenditure on advertising and promotion. Many analysts have noted the increasing tendency to spend too much on such services, especially in recent years. Some ministries, for example, publish weekly full- page advertisements, costing millions of pounds every year, about their achievements great and small. These can have only one aim: deflecting press criticism.
I can offer only a brief summary of an in-depth study on the deterioration of the government apparatus -- in my opinion, one of the most important to appear in recent times.
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