Recruitment of graduates to public service: Another NPP U-turn

Implementing policies by a political administration that stand in complete contrast with the views and stances they stood for while in the Opposition is part and parcel in the opportunistic trade of politics. The NPP’s recent 360-degree turn on recruitment of graduates to the public service as enunciated by the Minister of Agriculture K.D. Lalkantha at a recent public meeting serves as a classical manifestation of political expediency.

The prominent NPP politician’s remark that the Government would not recruit graduates to the public sector in large scale would have undoubtedly pleased captains in the private sector as well as ideologues who favour market-friendly economic policies. His statement demonstrates the Government’s commitment to fiscal prudency and it bodes well for the island’s economic stability.

Ironically though, the NPP/JVP throughout history pressurised the Governments in power to provide jobs in the public sector to degree holders who cannot either secure employment in the private sector or do not have the drive and capacity to engage in self-income generating ventures. Unemployed graduates have represented a core constituency of leftist political parties like the JVP and FSP. Most of the NPP leaders, including President Anura Kumara Disanayake, are graduates of Sri Lanka’s public university system and majority of them were involved in university student politics. Lalkantha, however, comes from a trade union background and does not come across as an intellect or scholar.

Given the unprecedented support the NPP obtained from the youth and local university students/graduates, the Kandy District MP’s outburst would have caused some ruptures among the NPP’s political base and leadership echelons. The NPP created a sense of hope among the youth while campaigning for the two national elections apart from promising a life full of material comforts.

Although Lalkantha has developed a sudden allergy towards large-scale recruitment of graduates to the public sector, the JVP – the predecessor to the NPP – was at the forefront of conceptualising mass-scale recruitment of graduates in the past. Furthermore, the JVP viscerally opposed the then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s attempts to downsize the public sector workforce as part of economic reforms envisaged by the economic blueprint of his two-year premiership during the early part of the 21st Century – Regaining Sri Lanka. At the end of 2001, Sri Lanka’s public sector employment (excluding semi-government agencies) was 863,993 according to the Central Bank. After the conclusion of the two-year Wickremesinghe administration, it had declined to 785,756 (2003). 

During the 2004 Parliamentary Election campaign, the JVP-inspired, UPFA coalition lambasted Wickremesinghe for curtailing recruitments to the public sector, and they promised to the electorate that unemployed graduates would be given state-sector jobs upon assuming power. Over the decade until 2014, the UPFA administration recruited a number of graduates as Development Officers purely on political considerations. Consequently, the employment in the State sector had increased to 1,068,773 (2014) when the UPFA left office. 

The UPFA coalition (of which Lalkantha functioned as the Minister of Rural Industries) undertook an initiative to provide state-sector jobs to unemployed graduates in wholesale by absorbing them as program officers. Around 40,000 graduates got jobs in the Government as part of that initiative in 2005. Under the presidency of Mahinda Rajapaksa, in a similar fashion, over 50,000 unemployed graduates were absorbed to the public sector in 2012 as so called Development Officers (DOs). Most of these DOs languish in Divisional Secretariats without doing any meaningful work and some have even termed the salaries they receive as handouts. A sample survey carried by the Auditor General Department in 2017 uncovered that more than 86% of the DOs were art graduates and in terms of gender, about 75% of them were women.

As Lalkantha has rightly pointed out, graduates should not be hired to the public sector artificially by creating bogus designations like DOs. Instead, the Government should take efforts to recruit graduates via competitive examinations and interviews for genuine vacancies so that such selected employees become an asset to the national economy.