President must manage time better

President must manage time better

It is not inspiring to see the President spending a great deal of time on tasks which he can conveniently delegate to others. The President is the Head of State, Head of Government and Commander in Chief of the Defence Forces. He has many onerous duties to perform which are crucial for the country’s security, development and good governance. He should operate on the plane of envisioning, planning, directing and overseeing the work of the Ministers.

If the output of the State media is anything to go by, the President appears to be, devoting too much time to handing over certificates, letters of appointment, promotions and grants of land by the hundreds and thousands and laying foundation stones. Taking a cue from him, the Ministers seem to be following suit.

In the public service there are long established procedures for carrying out these functions. If the task is merely the delivery of a document, the obvious procedure would be to use the services of the State postal service. There are a few appointments which the President himself makes such as those of the Ministers, Judges, Ministry Secretaries, Attorney General and Envoys to foreign countries and it would be proper form for the President himself to hand over the letters to convey the sense of importance and responsibility of the posts. But it would be a total misplacement of priorities if the President or even a Minister were to hand over letters of appointment or deliver induction addresses to Grama Sevakas, Waga Niladharis or even to School Principals, Medical Officers or SLAS cadets. The practice is in fact counter productive as it undermines the position of the Secretaries and Heads of Departments who should rightly perform these functions.

The cost of personal delivery of documents by the President or a Minister is enormous and certainly not cost effective. If a thousand officers were to attend such an occasion and assuming that every officer would be away from his work for one to three days, the total working time lost could be as much as 15,000 hours. To that if you were to add the cost of claims of travel and subsistence the cost would be staggering. That is not in keeping with the call for hard work and dedication to rebuild the country.

At the present time when the Treasury is finding it hard to meet even the recurrent costs of running the state services, it would be a great gesture if this practice can be curtailed. Time management is now a well developed art. There is no doubt that the senior officials around the President who would have been through management training, local or overseas, have been exposed to its theory and practice. They would be doing justice to the training they have had, if they could, advise the President on the need to make the necessary improvements in the present system and procedure.