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Despite all the good intentions of the Undersecretary to the President responsible to reform the government machine, the pace of the civil service reform is too slow, causing further frustration to companies and interest groups who want to promote Cyprus as a business centre.
Civil servants are now resorting to hiding behind the excuse of “work overload” in order to justify maintaining the huge reams of red tape, so long as things move at the pace they determine, and not the rate that the rest of the world wants.
This has been all too evident from the complaints with which we have been inundated in recent weeks that suggest that government employees have returned to their old antics of taking the phone off the hook from about 8am to 2.30pm and putting the receiver back seconds before they dash out the door. How else can one explain that numbers for low-output offices in, say, the Ministry of Education, or departments in the Ministry of Commerce being constantly engaged.
Was it not this government that declared it would streamline telephone exchanges so that a central line or operator would be available to at least take the calls of the public? There are some services that unfortunately cannot be accommodated by the Peoples’ Bureaus, as these offices, as efficient as they are, are not fully equipped to resolve problems, answers to which are well-guarded secrets by certain civil servants. This means that the only thing that these Bureaus have achieved is to speed up applications for public services, but cannot deal with trouble-shooting which remains the remit of civil servants.
Although some government departments are introducing a fair amount of efficiencies, others are still accepting applications for online services that have to be filled in by hand or submitted by fax.
We have yet to learn from the online revolution that took place in the UAE in the past decade, whereby all local administration issues are not filled in, submitted and even resolved online, and quickly too.
If the Undersecretary for reform wants to get things done, perhaps it’s time he cracks the whip and moves the civil service from the pace and mentality that prevails. Otherwise, no matter how much effort the private sector puts in, nothing will ever change.
