Our civil service is destroyed - Col Panji

Our civil service is destroyed - Col Panji
By Christopher Miti in Chipata
Sun 17 Jan. 2010, 04:01 CAT

COLONEL Panji Kaunda has observed that the Zambian civil service has been destroyed. In his review of last year, Col Panji said the government was the civil service and not the minister.

"I feel we have destroyed our civil service. The government is not the minister or deputy minister or the politicians, the government is the civil service and the civil service is supposed to serve any government that comes into power. The civil service is a trained body of cadres who know how the government runs,” Col Panji said.

“I am talking more so at the levels of the PS (permanent secretary), at the levels of the district commissioners. This should be separated from the parties...PF, UPND, MMD or others because these people are not really serving the MMD. They are serving all the people in Zambia. How is the civil service supposed to be run? It's a career, it's not the job for political party cadres. That's how the civil service was, they should go to the universities and get the best brains in these colleges and universities. They should be trained and they must come through the ranks. By the time they are PSs, they must understand how government works. I have no quarrel with people that are being appointed but they must qualify to run the government."

Col Panji said it was wrong to have permanent secretaries who aspire to be members of parliament. He challenged the Secretary to the Cabinet to take full control in supervising permanent secretaries to ensure that they operated in the manner expected of them.

“Unless we get our systems organised as it was before, the government will not run development in this country,” Col Panji said.

“Development will not be there because PSs are the ones who plan for that. I will give you an example of myself. I am an army man. I know how the army runs but I cannot be PS of the Ministry of Defence because I don't know how the government runs,” Col Panji said.

He also said in the past year, agriculture in the country had done fairly well because there was enough food although there was need to do more. Col Panji said Zambians were still politically immature because there was a lot of intolerance among the people.