What is the progress of the headhunting?
SOMETIME in October 2013, I wrote about headhunting in this column. It was not based on a rumour; hearsay, true, but the original information was from the horse’s mouth. A special panel had been established in KL – Committee on the Transformation of the Federal Civil Service – under the chairmanship of Tun Azmi. The operative word was ‘transformation’.
One fine day of the same month, the chairman dropped in at the state’s capital to meet with the local officials, apparently to discuss ways and means by which to transform the service in Sarawak.
A piece of information leaked to the press boys was that among the suggestions with which to improve the image (ethnically imbalanced) of the federal service here was simply to recruit more Dayaks into it.
A hunt for 10,000 qualified Dayaks to fill many of the 60,000 vacancies was launched with much fanfare. Fifteen Dayak personalities were appointed by the committee to help scout for the applicants throughout the length and breadth of the state. They had to report their findings (lists of interested individuals) to the committee before the end of the year, if possible.
A roadshow was mounted and potential job applicants thronged the halls where briefings were being held and application forms distributed.
Among them were qualified people including a number of graduates who had been unemployed for some time.
Everybody was excited about the whole exercise. Those who had applied were hopeful that they would be called for an interview and eventually recruited into a prestigious civil service. Parents and relatives of the applicants were praising sky-high the effort of the government. How good government was.
It’s now 2016, and a lot of water has flowed under the bridge yet there has been no news about the number of those Dayak applicants (in the forms they listed themselves Lain-Lain) who were successful in the posts which they had applied for.
Why? An uncharacteristic silence! It would have been a good move if it was properly carried out. Many people in the Dayak community were looking forward to seeing a change in the landscape of the civil service in terms of ethnic distribution with the recruitment of more Dayak officers in all branches and levels of the federal service.
Why the silence, if the exercise was a roaring success?
What I have since learnt from my jungle telegraph is an utter disappointment. Many applicants have not even been told whether or not to attend an interview let alone a letter of acknowledgement of their applications. Believe me not.
The search for candidates or applicants among the many Dayaks couldn’t have ended with a whimper. I might have missed reading about it.
People would like to learn from the horse’s mouth how many applicants have been considered and accepted and whether those recruits are undergoing training or induction courses, or are happily settling down in the various offices.
So far no news is good news. I thought that someone would jump to claim the credit for the success of the programme. Have they been taken for a ride?
The year 2013 was the parliamentary election year. Could it be that the intention to recruit more Dayaks into the federal service had something to do with winning the hearts and minds of the Dayaks who had been complaining about being marginalised in job placements? In terms of places in the civil service, they have been told that they would be given proportionate quotas. They have been referred to Article 153 of the Federal Constitution for an assurance of fair treatment. And in Sarawak they have been told to read Article 39 of the State Constitution for the allocation of quotas according to ethnic population. Yes, we have read all those provisions and we have read the Malaysia Agreement and the Report of the Cobbold Commission by which documents Malaysia was created.
As far as I remember, successive governments of Sarawak have not resorted to the provisions of Article 39 of the State Constitution and to work out a quota system for entry into the state civil service according to the size of each ethnic community. However, this is digressing a bit; a related matter though we are referring to the federal service. We have not even touched on the Borneonisation scheme – a neglected scheme of civil service which the founders of Malaysia from Sabah and Sarawak had wanted to be part of the deal for the creation of the Federation of Malaysia.
From the beginning, I was sceptical about the ability of the Dayak appointees to collect a list of the applicants within two months. They did their level best to compile the lists of various applicants within the time allocated by the Transformation Committee. Then it was up to the committee to act.
Yet, at the back of my mind were the prevailing problems at the time: the bloated civil service and the enormous amount of public money going into the pension fund every year. Yet there were 60,000 vacancies in the federal service open for application. I was frankly confused.
I thought all this would be a passing phase of the transformation of the service and that the civil service really needed the Dayaks to balance things a bit before some smart alec exploited the situation for his own purpose. So I gave everybody involved in the headhunting (for Dayak federal servants) the benefit of the doubt and wished them the best of luck.
After a long pause during which no good news was forthcoming from the Transformation Committee I began to wonder if the interest in recruiting more Dayaks had begun to wane. Hence the audible silence.
I’m hoping that during the year people may continue to discuss in public issues of national importance. We are all aware of the existence of the legal constraints – the restrictions in the freedom of expression; the existence of laws governing our behaviour in society. But in matters of national importance such as the intake to the civil service, a little query as to the progress of its transformation programme would be in order, I think.
How many Dayaks have been recruited into the federal service within the past two years?
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