LookAtVietnam – Earning only $120-180 per month, government employees cannot support their families. This partly explains their harassment of the public at administrative agencies.

Administration and politics are different things

Vietnam’s contingent of government employees is formed up from different sources. Their functions and duties are unclear. There is no job description for each position, regular assessments or training, so their working effect is poor.

Notably, many officials transferred into government jobs from social organizations like the Women’s Union or the Youth Union and from state-owned businesses. That’s an important reason why public administration recently has taken on the character of a mass movement, now inflated, now deflated.

In addition, data, statistics and documents at state agencies are not managed well, a cause of stagnation in the work flow of administrative agencies.

There are lots of gaps in the progression of an official’s career with respect to administrative training of an academic nature, so the professional depth of the civil service is limited. We don’t have civil servants who are professionally trained to make policy or implement programs.

In other countries, technically qualified civil servant specialist who don’t hold high level management positions are also esteemed; their salaries are substantial. In Vietnam, however, only government officials who have high positions can earn high salary.

Entering the ranks of the higher civil servants in Vietnam is difficult these days for people who don’t have a high position, meaning that this echelon is pretty much reserved for bureaucrats. Because they lack technical specialists, our agencies find it hard to solve complex and general problems. Discovering administrative-related problems and suggesting solutions is dependent on the ability of this kind of employees, who are scarce in Vietnam.

There’s no separation between politics and administration. Government employees and cadre of social organizations are trained in the same programmes. The government’s administrative curriculum has been the same for nearly 20 years and it is not adequate to the current situation.

In provinces and cities, administrative and political training schools have been merged in the last ten years, affecting the training of administrative employees.

The low wages paid to government employees also impacts their performance and their virtue. Earning only two or three million dong per month, civil servants, especially in the cities, cannot support their families. They get no housing support or help sending their children to school. And so, they have to ‘calculate.’ “One leg inside, one leg outside” (working simultaneously in two jobs) is a widespread accommodation that enables them to remain in a government job without resorting to corruption.

In Japan, government employees maintain a high moral quality because their salary is equivalent to the average wage of the private sector and the civil service is a highly respected career.

To carry out our administrative renovation well, we must change the thinking about the relationship between administration and politics; reforming [away] the political approach to the role of administration and management in contemporary development. We have to make clear why administrative procedures are established, to make them simpler, to reduce the trouble that’s inflicted on the people without also throwing out those procedures that are essential to accomplish administrative management tasks.

It is essential to reform personnel management and training of public servants. We need to emphasize a machinery of recruitment that really serves the people’s needs. It is also important to supervise and inspect administrative bodies and discipline those civil service employees who don’t carry out the administrative reforms properly.

Dr. Nguyen Thu Linh