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UGANDA: BEYOND THE MYOPIA OF “PERMANENCY” OF EMPLOYMENT: THE NEED FOR ROBUST PERMANENCE CONTRACT.
In the absence of robust and enforceable measures, this myopia with employment permanency can, like Caesar’s spirit, come hot from hell as the sector finds itself stuck with redundant and unproductive.
GULU-UGANDA: The is the edition of Prof John Patrick Opio assertion of the rot in Musevenism tyranny, it only the civil services that can remain without nepotism.
Un corrupted in a civilize government, as it was in the case of the founding father of independence, Dr. Apollo Milton Obote, even at the time of Dictator Idi Amin.
The civil services were not affecting, although in 1972 when President Amin dismissed Asian as non citizenry of Uganda, gave them 90 days to leave Uganda, and it resulted into Uganda economic war. The civil service remains without nepotism, un corrupted.
Here below is the verbatim of the Prof. Opio.
Hon. Deputy Speaker and the Chief Guest, before I discuss the concrete steps that my estimation could be taken to effect the most touted Clarke and Clegg paradigm shifts outlined in the objectives of the memorial lecture.
I call for a re-engineering of public sector employment mindset, although the take home pay and packages of public service sector trials that of the private sector, public sector jobs are considered safe and are sought after thousands of applicants line up and interviews are either done in shifts or within stadium-like facilities.
Having a permanent employment is attractive, however, once employment perceives permanency a license to sit back and relax, or a safety net against job loss. There is pretty little that can be done to transform the public sector.
In the absence of robust and enforceable measure, his myopia with employment permanency can, like Caesar’s spirit, come hot from hell as the sector find itself struck with redundant and unproductive work forces. Given the rapid pace of change in the private sector as well as the public sector.
It is simply catastrophic to the public interest to retain and maintain employees whose skills, knowledge and acumen are well below par just because they are permanenet and pensionable.
What the public sector needs in this respect is to establish and maintain a dynamic link between performance and employment contract and moved away from the traditional broad-based job desoriptions to performance contract.
As the name suggest, performance contract, implies a free negotiated agreement, as MoU. Between the employee and the government (Public Sector) specifying their mutual obligations commitments (OECD.1999).
PERFORMANCE Contract addresses economic, social or tasks or tasks that an agency has discharge for economic performance of desired results. It is organized and defines tasks so that management can performance systematically, purposefully and with reasonable probality of accomplishment.
It also assists in developing point of view, concepts and approaches for determing what should be done and how to go about it. Performance contracts comprise of mutually agreed performance targets, review and exaluation of periodic performance (Shirley.1998)
Performance contracting has successfully been used as a management tool to help public sector executives and police makers to define responsibilities and expectation between the contracting parties to achieve common mutually agreed goals. Our neighbours, Kenya and Rwanda have made useful strides and realized good gains thereupon.
Positively, performance neither contract nor only ensure that employees achieve their performance targets, but also demands that the employer commits resources to train, develop and re-skill the employees with requisite competences capabilities toward quality’ cliché can be a smokescreen, a cover up by the public sector to abdicate from commuting to employee development.
Therefore, as a tried and tested contemporary management tool, performance contract provides a useful safeguard against the Scylla of employee intransigence and the Charybdis of uncommitted public sector leadership, on the other hand.
In short, linking contract with performance through performance practice is efficacious, for positively redefining performance; bringing about a paradigmatic shift from an arcane, “Permanent and pesonionable” to permanently dynamic and productive” public sector employees. Permanency, thus seen is a dynamic and evolving process that includes skilling and retooling with due attention to environmental dynamics-rather than a state attained successful completion of probation period its idiosyncrasies notwithstanding.
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