Picking the right person for the job

TO administrate means to manage and direct the affairs of a business or institution, thus an administrator’s job should be a non-political one because thoe individuals are supposed to be appointed on merit.
Political office and other positions which require the people’s mandate to occupy can be said to have other priorities outside the day-to-day running of an organisation. Today, several provincial administrator’s positions are under threat of being politicised by groups and individuals who cannot possibly have the province’s welfare at heart.
We say this because from experience some of these provinces have not made major headway with regards to having improved services, infrastructure and a generally better standard of living when you consider the amount of money – running into the hundreds of millions of kina – which has been appropriated to the provincial authorities over the years.
People in the provinces want administrators who are neutral and do not have any political affiliation. Since the the positions were advertised, intense lobbying has taken place with some applicants apparently exerting an undue influence on the selection process.
How else can one explain the appointment of an obviously under-qualified candidate whose application would not have made it past the first stage of screening? Somewhere along the line the merit-based system used by the PSC to vet and select the most suitable applicant was compromised.
The DPM has a very deliberate and thorough set of criteria for ranking applicants according to their points scored for age, experience, qualifications, the applicant coming from a similar high-ranking position in another organisation, references and recommendations from previous employers or qualified people and even the state of their health. Using these criteria the applicants are ranked based on the number of points scored.
Usually the highest-scoring applicants make the short list of 10 which goes to the Central Agencies Coordinating Committee (CACC) who upholds the assessment made by the DPM. The top five of that list is then passed on to the PSC who conducts interviews with the applicants.
Once it reaches this stage it is almost certain that a successful applicant will be chosen from this group.
The offices of the DPM, the PSC and CACC are all located in Port Moresby. One would have thought that with the functions of all these offices centralised in the nation’s capital there is no reason why they cannot be coerced or pressured into bending their procedures to favour one party.
No one would ever have brain surgery performed by a science policy expert without a medical degree who had never set foot inside an operating room.
No one would ever have a high-rise office tower designed and built by a real estate industry lobbyist with no architectural training or any construction experience.
And surely no multimillion kina corporation would ever put as head of a major operating division a young man a few years out of college who had never managed funds or supervised more than a handful of people – even if he were the son of the CEO’s boyhood friend.
To manage government bureaucracies well takes a combination of many qualities, talents and skills: programme or technical expertise; organisational know-how; years of on-the-job experience; management and people skills; the wisdom of maturity; a high comfort level with relative anonymity; a willingness to subordinate private ambitions to the greater good of one’s public clients or programmes; and, perhaps most significantly, a long-term view with an abiding concern for the future of the organisation one leads.
The unfortunate truth is that many administrator’s posts are not sought by some because they have a desire to effect change in the province but because they have a self-serving agenda.