REPORT
ON REMARKS BY THE RT. HON. PERRY G. CHRISTIE
AT
CIVIL SOCIETY CONSULTATION GROUP
MINISTRY
OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
EAST HILL STREET, 18TH NOVEMBER, 2004
The
Prime Minister remarked that he wished to put his stamp of approval on
the effort toward public sector reform and that he had been a servant of
the public since 1974, when he was first appointed to the Senate. He had
served in the House of Assembly for a generation and had had the honour
to be a Minister in many portfolios. He had also served as the Chair of
many statutory corporations and bodies. He said that as a result of
these experiences, he believed that he knew a little bit about how the
public sector operated. He
indicated that he had some firm views about how the public sector needed
to be reformed, if our country was to advance.
He said that the effort
toward public sector reform though, had to be structured in such a way
that we would chart a careful course of change and not approach the
process in a willy-nilly fashion, without any clear idea of where we
were headed. He said that Bahamians would have to be committed to real
change.
The Prime Minister
identified a number of areas in which he felt reform was needed and also
spoke to improvement in the capacity of the Government for policy design
and decision-making, such as decisions relating to investments in the
country; and procedures regarding hurricane relief.
He also referred to the lack of institutional memory that seemed
to plague the public service.
The Prime Minister focussed
on monitoring the implementation of Cabinet decisions and drew examples
of how several weeks or months after Cabinet decisions had been made,
they had still not been carried out.
Prime Minister indicated
his support for the further development of e-government to accommodate
the increasing demand from the public to be able to access the
Government’s services by the internet - services such as those offered
by the Registrar General; visas; and Customs payments and clearances.
The Prime Minister spoke to
the need for the creation of a public assets management system to
identify the assets, including land, that the Government owned, as well
as information as to who controlled them and how they were deployed. He said that one of the major criticisms was that of lack of
maintenance of public buildings and he drew reference to the continual
embarrassment caused by the leaking airport roof.
The Prime Minister said
that rationalization of human resources and personnel policies was of
critical importance; and he referred to the example of how hiring and
promotion polices affected productivity in the service.
He also addressed the dissatisfactions people had with the lack
of transparency in these polices and the feeling of unfairness on the
part of many employees in the service.
In this regard, he quoted
from a report on reform in the British Civil Service: “Imagine becoming chief executive of a large organization and being told
that the entire management are ‘independent’, that you have no
control over their major levers of motivation -recruitment, promotion
and reward- and that they operate as a separate organization with a mind
of its own. Modern
organizations do not and cannot work like that.
Neither can Government.”
The Prime Minister also
stressed the importance of effective information dissemination and
communication within the public sector and within the wider public; and
he used as an example, the fact that even though the Government might
make a decision and carry it out to good effect, yet the public would be
unaware of the decision.
The Prime Minister told the
packed room that he had come in part to listen because he thought that
the private sector must buy into the need for change; and that while we
were discussing how to more effectively dispense public goods and
services, we ought to know how this impacted the public at large.
He said that he wanted to know from civil society what it thought
needed to be done.
He said that he was present
also to seek civil society’s support for change. Change was not easy,
he said, but he stressed that there must be change and that we all must
be willing to change.
In closing, the Prime
Minister said that he wanted to be sure that there was a broad consensus
built around how we reformed the public sector - whether and if this
meant changes in how we hired and who we hired as well as changed
institutional arrangements and resorting to more private sector
approaches to Government work, for example, should we borrow the
approaches of other countries where Ministries operated as public
corporations.
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