Appointing process not working

THE appointing process of many jobs in the civil service and, indeed, in any other private company is very clear.
There are set rules and procedures to be followed.
That is why we are perplexed at the continuing infighting over jobs in many public service positions today.
The fight over the secretary’s job at Agriculture and Livestock Department has taken many months and has ended up in physical confrontations between the two parties involved in the tussle.
And, then, there is the continuing tussle over in Community Services Department over the secretary’s job which has gone on for an embarrassingly long time.
Over the weekend, one James Wanjik was reported in the media as being offered the job of managing director of the Mineral Resources Authority.
MRA acting managing director Philip Samar came right back and said that the job is taken and challenged the former to provide evidence that he (Wanjik) has been offered the job.
Notice something. In each position, the interested parties are at loggerheads but the appointing authority seems very strangely silent.
This is most curious and, indeed, would appear as if the entire appointment process has collapsed.
Department heads are selected via a strenuous scrutiny which should, but does not often include a public advertisement both in-country and abroad for suitable candidates for the post.
The minister responsible, the Public Service Commission and the Department of Personnel Management are involved in the selection process. These different levels of authority do not work together but, often, on their own with one checking on the other to ensure the process is not corrupted.
In the end, a submission goes from the minister to the National Executive Council for a final decision on who should be a departmental head. The minister’s submission contains a short list of names for the post.
If this is the case of a provincial administrator, the same parties are normally involved but the provincial executive council gets to submit its short-list of names with its recommendation for the top post as well.
The NEC would most normally select one of the names on the short-list but it has discretion and absolute powers to go outside of the recommended list to appoint somebody entirely new but that should be a rare incident and one that should be frowned upon.
Once the NEC has made the decision, the process does not end there. The secretary of the NEC then writes to the governor-general recommending the names of the names to be named to the post.
Even after the governor-general signs the appointment, the job is actually not official until the National Gazette has published the appointment in the correct format.
Under such a system, we are at a loss to understand how it is that in the cases referred to here, there appear to be no evidence of appointments at any of these stages referred to.
Working the process backwards, even if some clever fraudster has published a gazettal notice that names one or the other officer, surely a check at Government House will ensure whether or not the governor-general has authorised such an appointment and, if that were flawed as well, surely, the NEC secretariat can produce minutes of cabinet meetings and decision undertaken. And so on, so forth, it goes until we arrive at the start of the advertising stage.
What seems obvious to us is that all the processes and procedures appear to have been thwarted by somebody in the appointment process.
All too often, we have officers who reach retirement age kept back in office against the law. Often jobs which might require a certain qualification is overlooked when studying a candidate’s credentials.
As often, an acting appointment is made which seems like a permanent appointment in its longevity evincing such fights for jobs as we are beginning to see.
The same strict processes we see in place in the public sector is also in place in the private sector including state-owned enterprises.
There have to be advertisements, selection processes, interviews and close scrutiny of qualifications.
Once these processes are abandoned, or shortcuts are taken or when the process does not get off the ground within a reasonable period, that is when corruption of the system sets in.
This is what we seem to be seeing at present.