A host of diplomats and insiders, given a cloak of anonymity in order to speak frankly, were quick to counter government’s claims that the recent shuffling of officials would boost “quality and efficiency”.
“Playing musical chairs,” they told the Post, would do nothing to address the pressing issues crippling the Kingdom’s government: the bloated administration and the often overlapping, redundant ministries and authorities.
Despite government exhortations that the reshuffle, approved by the National Assembly on Monday, would boost efficiency and performance, it’s largely been labelled a cosmetic change.
“So many ministries overlap in terms of competencies . . . For us, that was a bit disappointing, knowing it is a bit like musical chairs,” added one diplomat. “It was a missed opportunity also if one of the goals of the reshuffle was to send a reform message to the electorate.”
At its upper levels, Cambodia’s civil service, which em-ploys some 190,000 people, is indisputably swollen.
Following the reshuffle, which included several new secretaries of state, Cambodia’s executive branch now has almost 240 members: eight deputy prime ministers, 15 senior ministers, 14 ministers and 199 secretaries of state, according to Comfrel. This isn’t counting more than 200 undersecretaries of state, who are appointed by the premier and sit in the middle ground between the bureaucracy and executive.
“It’s a little big,” says Youk Bunna, a secretary of state at the Ministry of Public Function who is pushing public sector reform efforts. “There are some discussions that we should change the system to exclude secretaries of state as not being members of the government, but . . . if we want to do that, we have to amend the constitution.”
To a large extent, the top-heavy royal government is a legacy of the power-sharing years between the ruling Cambodian People’s Party and royalist Funcinpec, said Koul Panha, executive director of government watchdog Comfrel.
“They all wanted their senior politicians to have a role in government and were afraid of the coalition splitting, so they just broadened the government,” Panha said. “When the CPP formed a government [on their own] in 2008, people expected there might be some reform . . . but they did not, they just brought in more CPP people and anyone who defected from the opposition.”
After narrowly scraping through the 2013 elections, Prime Minister Hun Sen vowed change, telling officials to “scrub themselves clean” during a six-hour speech on planned reforms.
The government transferred several agencies run under the aegis of the Council of Ministers to their relevant ministries and combined the state secretariat of civil service, the royal school of administration and the general secretariat of public administrative reform into the Public Function Ministry.
The ministry now works to improve the bureaucracy’s human resource, but cleaning up Cambodia’s bureaucratic body remains a tall order. Twenty-eight ministries form its main limbs, and several authorities, established by various laws and decrees, have grown between
Post a Comment