THE government, move for fresh promotion to officers at the level of Deputy Secretaries and Joint secretaries to higher level comes as a fresh surprise to the nation as it is poised to add to a new financial load on the tax payers and to people in the private sector adding to their social discrimination and income disparity. We don’t understand why the government has taken the fresh move when such mass promotion was carried out only in May this year even without available post at Joint Secretary and Additional Secretary level. The number of additional secretaries has now gone almost four times the sanctioned posts in the organogram and the number of Joint Secretaries nearly three times.
The placement of newly promoted officers to the next posts thus remained stuck up in a severe gridlock in the process. Consequently, the promoted officers are continuing at their earlier offices and almost doing the earlier jobs except drawing higher salary and other entitlements at higher grades. Although it is not adding to their dignity and service efficiency, they continue to lobby for promotion as party loyalists and the government is using promotion to buy their loyalty. But it appears that the public service is becoming highly politicized and in the process ignoring the requirement of offering impartial expert opinion. The civil servants cadre is different from the party cadre.
It appears that rapid promotion is creating a bureaucracy, which is quickly becoming heavy on the top and adding to the government expenditure to pay their enhanced salary and benefits. The government last year almost doubled salary of bureaucrats bringing heavy pressure on the budget and the affordability of the nation to arrange huge funds to pay them. Now the move for a second time promotion at senior level within a year seems to be going to add yet another allocative pressure on the budget. And such move is at work when the entire development budget is already based on borrowing from local and external sources.
We must say public servants must get their due promotion but there must be a timeframe for every such promotion and that must be based on seniority, efficiency and availability of posts within the system. Civil servants turn party cadres will be no help to run a government efficiently.
