Civil Service development is the key. How it succeeds will define the success of our nation. What could be as nakedly revealing as this?

That is why His Majesty the King conferred special award to civil servants who served the country for more than 35 years a week ago today in Paro.

And now the best things are on the roll. The Royal Civil Service Commission (RCSC) is on the move to overhaul the entire system so that it becomes efficient and the true centre of effective service delivery in the country.

We have so long asked for a change in the civil service. It is good news that RCSC is now planning for a civil service that  is efficient and free of corruption. This system ought to have been in place a long time ago. But we must praise ourselves for making the effort to drive ourselves to the direction of change that we yearned for so desperately. Let’s applaud the boldness we could show this day.

RCSC’s idea of hiring retired civil servants to train young recruits is laudable. We need this, absolutely, because our young civil servants are growing without guidance and encouragement to rise with experience and required knowledge.

We know that at the heart of the problem lies indifference. Mentorship is vital. Lack of this arrangement has cost us too much already. Weak civil service means inefficient governance. How plain ought it to be to explain this unclothed fact?

We have a pool of experienced professionals who had to leave the system because of age. Laws must be respected, but it is our genius to use the knowledge that is available to us. That, in other terms, could be called innovation. We have arrived at a time when we must be smart innovators.

What prevails in our system today is that a large majority of our young civil servants are compelled to face vivid indifference in the system. That’s why many young and promising civil servants are leaving the system to whittle their own future someplace else.

The message is clear. His Majesty The King said that the future of the country depends on the strength and worth of the nation’s civil service.

Every year, thousands of seasoned citizens retire and pass on to the realm of insignificance. Yet they are the ones who developed the very contours of the nation’s soul.

There is a thing to kill in our governance system at the heart of which lies the worth of civil servants. We call it indifference. Apathy has reigned in our system for a long time.  A change in how civil service works will only do us good.

We mustered the courage to walk out of the old path. What we, a forward-looking nation, now need is to tread a route that will get us to a world that is both well-organised and vastly promising.

We approve of RCSC’s daring to bring about necessary change in the way we govern ourselves.

This initiative must succeed. Only then will we be able to pull ourselves out of the sludgy bureaucratic mire that we are deeply immersed in today.

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