23 Jun Building a better Public Service
United Nations Public Service Day – 23 June 2022
Public administration remains the cornerstone of any government’s work. It plays an essential and critical role in improving the lives of the administered through the daily services delivered by battalions of foot soldiers who serve the public across all public offices. The ability of each of these public servants to act fairly, openly and transparently and build effective partnerships with each other that work in perfect harmony determines the quality of the public service. Ultimately, their service delivery guarantees respect of our democratic Third Republic principles and ensures that we deliver on our pledges for a better country.
Speaking of the civil service in his time, Winston Churchill warned that “after a time, It is our collective duty to ensure that this does not happen.
As we emerge from two years of the COVID-19 pandemic with its lockdowns and go slows, the universal rallying cry for this year’s Public Service Day is to build back better.
The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us two important lessons. The first is to always expect the unexpected – times when health or other emergencies redefine our priorities and force us into unforeseen and unimagined directions.
The second lesson is that the world is no longer the same. Maintaining peace and justice in this unstable post-pandemic world demands that we rethink how we have worked to date. To build back better we must reinvent, modernize and transform our age-old public service and adapt it to today’s needs.
With one eye on our constitutional commitments and the other on the 2030 deadline for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, we must all work together to build a public service that is strong, efficient, effective, transparent, and accountable. Where public administration is weak, inefficient, ineffective, opaque and unaccountable, governments are incapacitated; and where governments are incapacitated, development will fall short of targets.
The Ombudsman is one of the constitutional institutions tasked with supervising the service delivery of all public authorities. The Office is the ultimate destination for the frustrated citizen who has an issue with how the public officers behave in delivering the services that the people expect from their Government.
By investigating those administrative actions, the Ombudsman can form opinions on the decision or action and recommend a course of action to remedy the grievance. By ensuring that civil servants remain servants of the people and above all remain civil in their task, the Ombudsman plays a key role in helping the public administration build effective partnerships that help improve the service for the benefit of all.
Nichole Tirant-Gherardi
Ombudsman
23rd June 2022