Wanted
Civil servants with ideas
Aspiring Singaporeans told: If you're strictly-by-the-books, risk averse, you won't make it. By Seah Chiang Nee
Apr 12, 2004

A CITY in transition striving to become more business-minded and creative, Singapore is confronted with an inflexible object that it hopes to change - the civil service.

Don't get me wrong. There's no deterioration of this traditional asset left behind by the British. It is still an efficient, strictly-by-the-book force that has helped to build today's Singapore.

No vision, however brilliant, can work without honest, capable people implementing it.
But in a changing world, these qualities are now standing in the way of its ambition.

Neither has recruitment quality come down. In fact, the opposite is true. Out of last year's 3,000 new civil servants, some 2,500 (or 83%) were university graduates.

The government has been dropping, or dramatically changing, some of the big policies that had worked in the past but no longer useful as the industrial era gives way to an entrepreneurial and high-tech services economy.

It needs enterprising people - not compliant civil servants who simply follow the rules.
Defence Minister Teo Chee Hean, widely speculated to become the next Deputy Prime Minister, recently set down their role in the new era.

He named three fundamental weaknesses: they were too risk-averse, they lacked understanding of how markets worked, and they didn't cooperate enough with other ministries.

The economy was in a new phase of development and the public sector should encourage enterprise, he said.

From now on, public employees from permanent secretaries downward would be appraised by the new ideas they come up with and which are implemented.

Keeping quiet, simply following orders and focusing only on implementation would not be a career-enhancing strategy, said Teo.

Recently, long-serving bureaucrat Ngiam Tong Dow, now retired, charged that the public service had been on autopilot for too long, routinely carrying out past policies.

Because civil servants were operating in a highly regulated society, their job in the past was not too difficult. A lot of work was set out for them and the need for initiative was low.

When a member of the public came with a special request, all an officer had to do was to refer to the regulations. If rejected as per the rules, no amount of appeal would work.

Nobody ever got punished for making a mistake as long as he followed the books. Enterprise and risk-taking could be dangerous to a civil servant's career.

Recently, I had lunch with an engineer who gave up his job and transformed his father's old coffee shop into a modern franchise business.

He had applied to open another coffee shop in middle East Coast Road. To his disappointment, it was turned down on advice from the transport authority which feared it could add to the traffic jams.

He told me he had taken several days to count car usage at peak hours and submitted his findings with his appeal, which showed it wasn't true. No dice. He gave up.

"Why should the transport department have a say in approving or rejecting an application for a business licence?" he asked.

The price for orderliness has been excessively high. During the golden years of growth, the government had jacked up salaries of top officials and political leaders to attract the best academic talent and outbid the private sector.

By doing that, say critics, it created an elite class that is paid wages far higher than any other country in the world.

The benefit is an efficient, corrupt-free bureaucracy; the downside is growing resentment among citizens, especially those hard hit by the downturn.

The government this year cut graduates' starting pay in the public sector by 1.8% across the board, reaching 20% in some cases.

Last May, ministers and top civil servants took a 10% pay cut, the second since 2001. Since then, their annual salaries have fallen by between 24% and 29%.

This was to close the gap with the private sector, which was paying less.

But the pay cut has not reduced interest among job seekers. In fact, in a difficult job market, more people are trying to get into the civil service for security.

According to American academic Philip Anderson, bureaucracy is the biggest weakness to Singapore's efforts to promote entrepreneurship.

Civil servants who regulate business here, he said, had absolutely no experience in the private sector.

"They're honest, smart and efficient but they're naïve," said the professor at Insead's Asian campus.

There was a natural tendency for bureaucrats to be risk-averse, he said.

"If you're a bureaucrat and you have a choice between doing a risky thing that might blow up in your face, but might really help entrepreneurs, versus 'let's just follow the rules, tick by tick', any bureaucrat worth his salt will pick the second choice.

"In Singapore, you have many civil servants who have never been anything but that.
"If you're a civil servant, your No.1 job is to support your minister. Fine and dandy, but it doesn't really help you understand how to support entrepreneurs," Anderson added.

The defence minister's message notwithstanding, mindset changes in the bureaucracy, if it comes, will be slow and tedious. Physical objectives are easier to achieve.

The problem is not entirely the fault of civil servants. They take orders from the minister in charge.

Some of their problems lie in a political leadership that is generally reluctant to deregulate too quickly for fear that things will go wrong.

Secondly, the corrupt-free reputation to an extent depends on officials - high and low - sticking to the rules.

Granting discretionary powers to individual officials to grant approvals or licences to reduce red tape may, it is feared, increase the potential for corruption.

Like everyone else, today's civil servants are facing rapid changes, new threats and new opportunities.

It's not hard to simply allow every businessman or tourist to enter the country. That will obviously benefit the economy - until one starts to worry about imported crime or terrorist attacks.

Unlike the previous one, today's generation of Singaporeans has high expectations of its public services and low tolerance of fee increases, which makes it look worse than it really is.
(This article was published in The Sunday Star on Apr 11, 2004.)