By Letter
Published: July 15, 2012
KARACHI: Two retired civil servants died last week. Both of them, in their own ways, represented the best of Pakistan’s civil service in the best of times.
The senior and better known of the two, Masood Nabi Nur, served in every region of the country as commissioner or deputy commissioner and, perhaps, was the first to be the chief secretary of both Punjab and Sindh. By the sheer force of his charming personality, he made his subordinates work hard and never grudged them recognition — this writer was one of them. That is how the civil servants were recruited through a competitive system and then trained.
The other to depart is Imtiaz Ahmed Khan. He was, perhaps, the first to join the civil service after getting a PhD from America before the age of 24, which was the upper age limit for sitting in the CSS exam. He was a gentleman to the core and an effective deputy commissioner of some turbulent districts across the country. The death of the civil servants of yesteryear is to be mourned for their likes are hard to be seen today. Always vulnerable to political pressures and other temptations, they could hold their ground so long as they had the pride of service and were also constitutionally protected against arbitrary action.
After Zulfikar Ali Bhutto assumed absolute authority as head of the state and government and chief martial law administrator, all power emanated from him and his PPP. He broke the civil service into three groups — tribal, secretariat and district — and cancelled their covenants. That confronted the civil servants with a hard choice between the dictates of a person or party or go by the law using their own discretion in a given situation. Most opted for the former.
The time-old rule of recruitment and promotion on merit alone was abandoned. The result of 40 years of Bhutto’s so-called reforms has been that neither the party in power nor the civil servants can govern. Every politician in power selects his own favourites from a loose cadre or rank outsiders. It has become what the Greek call a ‘kakistocracy’ or government by the worst men.
In that kind of selection, personal preferences outweigh merit and suitability. It is sheer good luck of the people if personal loyalty and competence happen to combine in one official. People, as a whole, have lost trust in the integrity and independence of civil servants, including their specialised cadres like police, economic planners, financial experts and all the rest. The replacement of a ruling party through elections, even if fairly conducted, will not lead to impartial governance unless the civil servants are appointed on merit and are made to act under the law and are punished when they do not.
Kunwar Idris
http://tribune.com.pk/story/408673/d...ivil-servants/