Government sets up commission to reform civil service

The Afghan government has set up a commission to fight corruption and nepotism and to reform the civil service. President Hamid Karzai issued a presidential decree to this effect on 10 June. Speaking on Sunday, Karzai said national revenues could not increase while the rotten administrative system continued to exist. "We have a great nation, but this proud nation does not have an efficient national civil service to lead it to prosperity," he said. The government has linked economic recovery to reform of the top-heavy civil service. The civil service is "the product of 30 years of war and lack of development", Javed Ludin, a government spokesman, told IRIN on Monday, noting that foreign investment and development projects were hindered by corruption and inefficiency. The business community in the capital, Kabul, has often criticised the bureaucracy. Now, other Afghans are also becoming impatient with the slow pace of government reform. An official of the government's disaster preparedness department told IRIN it took his office a minimum of four weeks to respond to an emergency or natural disaster. "Three top authorities, including the head of state, have to approve an emergency operation," the civil servant, who declined to be named, said. Even Karzai acknowledged the lengthy procedure involved in processing official documents. "It is not a good administration when a person has to get tens of signatures to get his work done," he said. Overmanning is another problem. According to the Afghan labour and social affairs ministry, there are nearly 262,000 civil servants on the books country-wide drawing monthly salaries of between US $30 and $40. This is a huge wage bill in such a poor country. But in a country where the government is by far the largest employer, in recent weeks civil servants have been calling on the government to increase their salaries, come up with back pay and re-hire employees it had laid off. "It is impossible to prevent corruption until salaries are increased to meet the average monthly expenses of a family," Najibjan, a civil servant with 10 years' experience, told IRIN. However, Ludin said it was impossible to increase salaries while the government still relied to a great extent on foreign funding. "In the long term, the vision is that Afghanistan will have a small, efficient and competitively paid administration," he said, stressing that this could only become possible with economic growth, but this could not take place "until corruption and inefficiency are rooted out of the administration". The government also said it would work to root out nepotism currently existing in the civil service. "It is not good when someone gets a job because he knows the boss or director," Karzai said, adding that people who had talent and capability should be favoured for government positions.