Career civil servants best suited for CS advisor roles

The next move for newly appointed Cabinet secretaries is to get competent experts to assist them in their work. According to Public Service Commission regulations 2020, Cabinet Secretaries (CS) are entitled to an adviser and a consultant.

While the regulation gives the CS discretion to hire from within or outside the civil service, my advice is to utilise civil servants or people who have worked in government before. The advisory role of career civil servants should assist the CSs to acclimatise quickly and deliver in their dockets. First, nothing contributes more to the stability and efficiency of the public service than the ability of career officials to mould the views of all participants in the policy-making process.

According to David Easton's system theory, requests from citizens must be considered and processed through the combustion chamber to come out as either policies or decisions. A decision to either incorporate career civil servants as part of the combustion chamber, which in this case is an advisory role or not, can have a bearing on the effectiveness of government policies. Secondly, civil servants' advisory role enhances the wisdom of policy decisions in the eyes of the citizens.

This expert advice is rooted in the characteristics of public organisations and increasingly, in the skills of their members. In modern times, the operation of executive agencies at all levels of government demands the employment of a diverse and complex range of specialised persons so that the CSs will find whatever talent or skill from whichever region within the ranks of civil servants. Consequently, it will be upon the career civil servant acting as the adviser to tailor his expert recommendations, drawing from what has worked and failed in the past.

Third, the influence of bureaucratic advice on policy decisions stands out very clearly not only in the internal activities of the executive branch but also in the deliberations of the parliamentary bills. Most bills are incubated and drafted in government departments. Better and relevant legislative programs stem from the advice of bureaucrats in the executive. In simple terms, civil servants stand at a vantage point from where they see the need for new legislation. Maine State Governor and professor of Languages and rhetoric, Lawrence Chamberlain, remarked that an administrative officer lives with his job.

He further submitted that this officer, while dealing with raw materials of administration at which point the government and the public meet, becomes keenly conscious of the inadequacies, ambiguities and lacunae of the law he administers. Another factor that puts career civil servant advisers in a better position to advise is the training most of them undergo. Government-sponsored courses offered at Kenya School Government equip civil servants with tools of management. There is no better way for the government to reap from this investment than to allow civil servants advise senior officials from a point of knowledge and long years of training as opposed to an outside expert who is required to rely on the wisdom and information generated by others.

Fifth, retaining career civil servants as advisers will assist in containing the cost of the wage bill because such advisers are already on government payrolls.

Mr Musanga is a political scientist