On Government (11 June 2004)

Let me ask you a question. When you hear the words Civil Service, what comes to mind?

You don’t need to answer that. I'm not going to, beyond suggesting that what comes to my mind is something similar to the old American joke about Army Intelligence. What I want to talk about today is the function and purpose of our civil service.

Because it doesn't work all that well.

Oh, it moves along. It floats, as does a log on the ocean; we've set it up so it can't sink easily, rather like a flat-bottomed boat. But it doesn't move with any kind of efficiency or speed, and it doesn't really get anywhere much.

Now that surprises and frustrates many people, myself included. In fact, although I'm sitting in a position that is a part of the civil service, I spend a lot of time wondering whether the existence of that position — or even of my whole division — makes all that much sense. It's not that I don't think that my division and its officers are incapable of doing good work. On the contrary; they're some of the most dedicated people I've come across in quite a while. It's not that I don't trust the government to do anything good. On the contrary; the government — and civil servants — regularly do many good and necessary things without fanfare, and keep the country going despite all the odds that work against them.

No. It's the system that's the source of my frustration. It's the entire set-up of the civil service, the hierarchy of the whole, the centralization of crucial activity in a few key areas, the limitations placed upon individual civil servants by the clauses of General Orders. It's the system, and there's a good reason why.

The civil service as we know it is a colonial tool. It was designed to get the most out of the administration of far-off colonies, and during colonial times it worked very well. You see, the British learned early that if you give a subjugated people a measure of power you achieve three main purposes.

First, you make people feel important, because they have a hand in governing themselves. (The British gave internal governance only to those people they figured could handle it without sowing the seeds of revolution and breaking away from the empire.)

Second, you give people just enough power so that they can occupy themselves lording it over other people, and never think of getting rid of you.

And third, you save yourself money and headache because you can pay the locals smaller wages than you would pay colonial officers sent out from England, and you don't have to worry about little issues like tax collection and the granting of licences. You get the people on the ground to do the dirty work for you.

You see, the civil service (as we know it) was never designed to run a country. Rather, it was created to provide imperial powers with middle managers who were trained just enough to be able to take care of little crises without difficulty, but who would have to refer to the imperial power for anything that was important or great.

It is for this reason that our system is so centralized — financed by a Consolidated Fund, into which all full government agencies deposit their revenue and to which all agencies turn to get their revenue re-dispensed to them again, and governed by a very few civil servants at the very top.

It is for this reason that our system is so hierarchical. Very few individual civil servants, no matter what his or her level in the system, can make any major decision without referring it to the servant above.

It is for this reason that independent action is extremely difficult to carry out in the civil service; very few members of the service have the autonomy to perform their duties without having specifically been directed to do so.

We must always remember this. The system we inherited at independence was designed by an imperial power to provide local government in distant colonies. It was never designed to govern. It was a tool used by the British Empire to manage on-the-ground activities from afar.

So when we groan about the deficiencies of our civil service, or even especially of the civil servants themselves, we need to understand that the problem cannot be solved by changing the people in it, or by making some cosmetic changes. The problem can only be solved by redesigning the government from the ground up — by recognizing that what we have can never meet the needs of a prosperous and growing independent nation. It can certainly not cultivate the vision and the independence and the daring that allows us to develop further, because it was never designed to do so.

But we have a country to govern, and not a colony. It is time we examine our system of government from the ground up. We need to recognize that if we wish to be a first-world nation, we must make for ourselves a first-world government.

We Bahamians are free. We deserve a government designed to serve our freedom.