Why expect dedication from miserable employees?
Apr 11, 2011
EDITOR: Prof. James Katorobo's article “Performance contracts will not work in the public service" was spot on. As he puts it, you cannot solve a problem by skirting around its causes.
EDITOR: Prof. James Katorobo's article “Performance contracts will not work in the public service" was spot on. As he puts it, you cannot solve a problem by skirting around its causes.
How do you realize good performance from a severely underpaid, highly demoralised, under-facilitated service? The Government has since the mid-1980s made a number of wrongly sequenced and sometimes ill-conceived public service reforms like retrenchment, decentralisation, recentralisation, privatisation etc, but performance improvement has remained elusive.
Where are we getting it wrong? We know what we should do to improve performance but for unclear reasons we just do not do it. Take an example of the creation of public institutions like Uganda Revenue Authority, National Water and Sewerage Corporation, Auditor General’s Office, etc.
When the Government realised the need to improve revenue collection, water supply and auditing of public funds, it created these three institutions, and gave the workers there very handsome emoluments.
This has paid off. But the same government leaves other sectors poorly staffed, poorly paid, under-facilitated, ill-trained and demotivated but expects good performance from them too.
What a paradox! If the chief executive of URA or NWSC can bag over sh20m a month in order to perform, why should we expect equal dedication and output from a permanent secretary who is paid less than sh2m a month? These jobs are equally if not more demanding and the holders went to the same universities and go to the same markets! With or without performance contracts, unless a robust framework is established to recruit the right people in the right numbers and positions and allocate them the tasks which they are best suited to perform, we shall remain with a poorly performing public service.
Kabuzi J. Kabengo
Kampala
How do you realize good performance from a severely underpaid, highly demoralised, under-facilitated service? The Government has since the mid-1980s made a number of wrongly sequenced and sometimes ill-conceived public service reforms like retrenchment, decentralisation, recentralisation, privatisation etc, but performance improvement has remained elusive.
Where are we getting it wrong? We know what we should do to improve performance but for unclear reasons we just do not do it. Take an example of the creation of public institutions like Uganda Revenue Authority, National Water and Sewerage Corporation, Auditor General’s Office, etc.
When the Government realised the need to improve revenue collection, water supply and auditing of public funds, it created these three institutions, and gave the workers there very handsome emoluments.
This has paid off. But the same government leaves other sectors poorly staffed, poorly paid, under-facilitated, ill-trained and demotivated but expects good performance from them too.
What a paradox! If the chief executive of URA or NWSC can bag over sh20m a month in order to perform, why should we expect equal dedication and output from a permanent secretary who is paid less than sh2m a month? These jobs are equally if not more demanding and the holders went to the same universities and go to the same markets! With or without performance contracts, unless a robust framework is established to recruit the right people in the right numbers and positions and allocate them the tasks which they are best suited to perform, we shall remain with a poorly performing public service.
Kabuzi J. Kabengo
Kampala