By Lamin Kujabi
Highlighting his ministry’s reforms agenda before the President of the Republic, during the routine ‘Delivery forum’, the Minister of Public Service, Administrative Reforms, Policy Coordination, and Delivery, Babucar Bouy underscored the importance of enhancing the welfare of civil servants and the need to not just recruit the best but also retain them. He also pointed to the fact that civil servants should not just be looked after while in active service but also even after they retire. “They should be entitled to some payments like gratuity and monthly pension,” he added.
The minister expressed his Ministry’s commitment to its mandate of ensuring effective and efficient public service. “At the end of the day, as a government, what matters to us as part of our contract with the citizens, is the quality of service that government is delivering. However, for that to happen there must be an engineer and the engineer [in this case ] is the civil service,” he remarked.
Further on their commitment, Minister Bouy said they are determined to improve service delivery by the public service so that citizens get best of what government is providing.
In his reaction to the presentation, the President, according to the Public Service Minister, reaffirmed his satisfaction over the idea of creating a ministry of Public Service, the content of the presentation being a good justification.
“The President was actually with the view that if this ministry was not created most of what we reported would have rested on the shoulder of his office,” Mr Bouy said.
However, the Public Service Minister acknowledged the challenge of implementing the reforms. “Reforms that involve the establishment of systems that depend on people are usually not as easy as activities that you normally engage in when it comes to certain projects like construction projects and others. These are things that require building of capacities, changing of attitude, the work culture and not only that the instruments that you will need to make those things happen also have to be looked at”.
The Delivery Forum was attended by the Vice President Mohammed BS. Jallow, Secretary General and Head of Civil Service, Secretary to Cabinet, Permanent Secretary and Deputy Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Public Service.
