Use integrity to fill public service posts
By Editorial.Team, October 12, 2022A new administration always raises the public’s hopes for a fresh start devoid of the mistakes of the past. The expectations wananchi have for the Kenya Kwanza administration – now on its 30th day — are no different.
Already, there have been shortlisting for various public and State offices, including for Permanent Secretaries as well as officers likely to take over at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations as well as the next Inspector-General of Police.
In all these appointments, there is high expectation that the relevant authorities will select candidates based on merit and integrity even as they take care to ensure gender and regional balance, and other constitutional requirements such as creating opportunities for youth, special groups and people living with disability.
Of course, this is a tough call, and that is why the panels must live up to the high standards that the public expects of them. What Kenya needs now, more than ever before, are men and women who will serve the public selflessly and who are willing to roll up their sleeves and engage in the hard work of making the civil service and other government institutions deliver to the people. They must not go there to line their pockets as has happened historically. There has been a misconception that has taken root over the years that public and State officer jobs are meant to make the beneficiaries wealthy. This is at variance with best practice internationally, particularly in the Commonwealth where these positions are meant to ideally benefit the citizenry by ensuring that only the best candidates are picked and they understand the requirements of the job even before they apply for it.
As such, the new administration needs to send a strong signal that it is breaking with the past. Even where it picks one of its supporters to a position, it ought to be on the understanding that they were hired to deliver services to Kenyans, not as a reward for their political work.
Kenya has a chance to raise the bar in the way it hires the people who will occupy critical public positions such as PSs, directors and CEOs of parastatals, police bosses and Chief Administrative Secretaries if the latter position is retained. The question is: Do the appointing panels have the political will and the free hand to pick only the best based primarily on merit even as they balance the regional and gender equation? This is the challenge that the country ought to confront early in the new dispensation because if we allow merit and integrity to be thrown out of the window, we will have dug ourselves deeper into the morass of institutional decay.