An uncivil service
EU monitors may have noted the fate of a director general at the Prime Minister's office who was sacked a few months ago. The reason given by the minister responsible was that the toilets in the bathroom of the government building he was responsible for were not working properly.
But behind the farce there is a serious issue trying to get out.
Let's start at the beginning. Back in 1992 in the days of the centre-right coalition government of Hanna Suchocka, the EU prompted the construction of an efficient civil service. The new set-up would ensure civil servants were neutral professionals instead of cronies and political deadbeats with security of tenure and sensible salaries replacing soup-kitchen pay.
The Suchocka government lost power in 1993, but the work it began was useful. A civil service law was passed during the SLD-PSL's 1993-1997 administration. The project quickly moved into controversy as the outgoing government in 1997 showed indecent haste in filling civil service posts with its own supporters. There were claims of requirements, such as language examinations being waved, in order to get the "right people" into the right jobs.
The new Solidarnoć government adjusted to the civil service law in 1998 to stiffen examination requirements. Examinations were now genuine, and more graduates from the KSAP began to get jobs rather than the old guard from the 1970s and 1980s. However, ministers still found ways to insert cronies into jobs. When the result of a competition for a senior appointment was not to their liking, they just suspended the selection and appointed caretaker administrators instead.
The Miller government carried on in similar vein. It short-circuited the system by suspending the provision for competitive appointments and gave ministers the right to appoint their people to the top jobs. Those already in place are being flushed out by such means as the defective toilet.
Just as it is impossible to have truly independent public broadcasting in post-socialist societies, it is unlikely that you can transplant a European civil service system into Poland. You cannot legislate for cultural factors. The pressure to get party worthies into jobs is simply too great to allow for an impartial civil service to emerge.
What should have been done is to have accepted the inevitable and worked to train up the political cadres so they are ready for the jobs they may have to do. Instead of permanent appointments, which will never be accepted by Poland's politicos, it would have been possible to compel all potential employees to pass examinations and provide funds for political parties to get their people professionally equipped.
However, we do have a civil service law in place, and it is distasteful to see the present government continuing the bad practice of trying to flout it at every turn. They should have more courage and actually change it. The reason it does not is to avoid attracting any more flack from the EU. So it continues the piecemeal approach of slowly undermining the civil service law.
The people I feel sorry for are all those young men and women from the KSAP who believed the platitudes about an impartial civil service and invested precious time and money passing exams and getting prepared to be professional public servants. They have every right to feel cheated. Unfortunately, they receive no backing from any significant political force. All administrations paid lip service to the importance of establishing a real civil service while doing their best to undermine it. With regard to this, these governments were true to the former Soviet-style practice of thinking one thing, saying another and doing yet another.
After Poland's accession to the EU the chickens will really come home to roost. All the failings of the civil service will become clear as Poland loses one EU project after another. It can only be hoped that the EU will honour its pledge that the people who are to be appointed in Brussels from Poland's quota will be recruited on an open competitive basis with the Commission doing the recruiting. That will be best for both Poland and the EU alike.
