By Mustapha Sesay
The government Human Resource Management Office, HRMO is reviewing the performance contract between the president and his ministers by “cascading it to affect permanent secretaries and others in the civil service”.
Acting Director General, Ansu Samuel Tucker, told the opening of a workshop at the Civil Service Training College in Freetown yesterday that the training for civil servants was part of the grand plan to ensure an effective service delivery.
He challenged participants, among them senior civil servants at supervisory levels, and called on heads of departments to set targets for their employees and subordinates.
He urged civil servants to treat the performance contract seriously, noting that ministers were being blamed for all the problems in their various ministries.
“Let’s focus on job description, setting of goals and evaluating of performances for all employees,” he urged.
He said the central human resource agency of the government of Sierra Leone had a mandate to ensure that “the civil service always has adequate, competent, trained and motivated staff to support national development programmes.”
World Bank’s Senior Governance Specialist, Christopher Gabelle observed that the key challenge affecting the country’s economy and social development “is the weak capacity of its public service”, adding that the acute shortage of expertise within the ministries was also visible.
Gabelle said that the public sector reform programme launched in 2009 was meant to strengthen the efficiency, effectiveness and accountability in public service and to deliver quality to especially the poor and vulnerable people.
He said “crooked recruitment, deployment, promotion and discipline bore the badges of political, regional or ethnic considerations” in the past ruined the civil service and “undermined hard work, discouraged high performance and attracted less qualified people to the service”.
He added that the expectation of quality delivery of service would be achieved if “retrenchment and salaries are informed by the virtues embedded in performance management appraisals.”
Director of Public Sector Reform Unit, Sidratu Koroma said that her organisation was planning to award a contract that would evaluate job performance.
She said the contract would look at all jobs in the different ministries to see which one was high grade and which was not, adding that they would endeavour to take away those who should have retired several years ago but were still working.
He urged government to “get rid of so-called ghost workers” and increase pay to reflect modern public service.
(C) Politico 10/10/13
