From the Past:: The raising of senior civil servant and minister salaries

Viewing the YouTube videos in the previous post resulted in my stumbling upon a Sylvia Lim video from the debate on the issue of Ministerial Salary increases back in March this year.

At that time, I had written a letter to the Straits Times Forum that was not published. Here is the text:

Civil Service and Ministerial Salary Increases

Dear Editor.
I refer to your Saturday Insight feature on solving the problem of the loss of civil service talent through increasing salaries, published in the 24th March Straits Times.

I completely agree on the need for capable, honest people to helm positions at all levels of our Civil Service, and that resignations of key talent constitutes a problem for our country.

The focus on salaries, however, sounds like a focus on the symptoms of an illness, rather than the root causes.

Consider a community which noted a trend of increasing levels of serious illness among it's members. "More hospital beds!", they cry. "And we need more doctors and nurses and medicines." Being a wealthy community, paying for these additional hospital beds and medical staff and supplies did not prove to be a problem. Intense discussions were then held on how many additional hospital beds and medical staff was the right number, and in what timeframe they were needed. Unfortunately, few thought to ask why the community was falling ill. Was there pollution of food and water supplies? Insufficient exercise? Overwork? Mental Stress? A new epidemic emerging? The community was more interested in providing facilities for the ill, then in understand and preventing illness in the first place.

Take now the analogy of national defence. Do we merely talk of increasing defence budgets, to buy larger quantities of ever more destructive weaponry? It's to the credit of Singapore's leaders that they speak instead of Total Defence. A holistic view that addresses multiple areas in which the Nation's ability to withstand attack may be sorely wanting.

If good men and women are unwilling to continue working in the civil service, what are the root causes? To what extent do each of these root causes contribute to their desire to leave the civil service for the private sector?

I would like to have seen your Insight feature report on interviews with talented civil servants who have left for the public sector and ask them about their motivations for leaving. Also valuable would be interviews with Head Hunters and the Human Resource managers in the private firms that are drawing away our civil service star performers. Let's see all sides of this important issue, and apply the concept of Total Defence to retaining talent in the civil service.