Personnel Dept to review manpower

A TOTAL review of manpower in the public service is being planned by the Department of Personnel Management to make it lean and effective in service delivery.
Department secretary John Kali said last Friday, while speaking to provincial administrators in Lae, Morobe province, that the department would conduct a manpower review on a quarterly basis.
The review would help eliminate waste and fraud in salary administration, improve management of human resource requirements, set a new manpower ceiling for the next fiscal year and reduce spending on salaries through retrenchments and retirements.
This would also assist in making future pay increases affordable that would be based on performance and production, he said.
The quarterly process would include an update of the establishment of registered positional occupancy and of the unattached officers and long-term suspensions.
Mr Kali said part of that process included the allocation of K40 million, by the National Government for houses for public servants beginning with the nation’s capital.
Housing for public servants was a sore point in exchanges during the day when Mr Kali said “housing was not a condition of employment”.
Several administrators told Mr Kali that housing would have to be made a condition.
They said in cases in the rural areas, public servants had to be housed in institutional housing to perform their duty of delivering service to the people.
Enga provincial administrator Dr Samson Amean and Saundaun’s Joe Lungi emphasised the need for houses to be built by the Government in the districts.
They, and other administrators said if the Government were to have the public service implement the strategies in Vision 2050, then the Government would have to provide housing.
They said it was an important factor in trying to align the provincial administrations to implement Vision 2050.