Thanks for your input! Much appreciated.

However the Bahamian civil service is dysfunctional in many respects. You noted that the general orders that help to administer the civil service were drafted by English colonial bureaucrats. Thus, these orders are outdated; and successive governments have not revised them (or have done so only minimally).

Further, excessive political intrusion constrain civil service workers from the potentially fine job most of them are capable of doing. (Here too, political operatives disguised as civil servants may be a major problem for the rehabilitation of the service.)

I also believe that the dysfunctional nature of the current civil service include a perception of incompetence.

Finally, the lack of understanding on the part of the general public about the proper procedures in the civil service may also be a major barrier to reforming the service; but a certain laid-back mentality among the bureaucrats themselves pervade the service, creating a sense of incompetence and may lead to public distrust.

The interaction between these three things, I believe, may prevent major reform.

Having written all of this, I qualify my “yes” by saying that “the country needs another bureaucrat” only to the extent that we succeed in reforming the civil service and restoring it to the proper place of helping to run the country for the benefit of all Bahamians.

But, your blog entry seems to hint at a more personal nature for your concerns. Unlike the majority of civil servants (bureaucrats as you will), you may be in a position to take early retirement. And I do believe that you have many other options. You may go back to teaching (as I am not in The Bahamas, I don’t know whether you’re still lecturing at COB). Outside of the civil service, and as a former servant in good standings, I believe that you may be in a position to advocate for major changes to the civil service.

A lot of people, most of them technocrats, have already answered the question for themselves and left the civil service. Is that the answer — specially in my field?

I really don’t know.

If you do, I wish you the best with what’s next. I just wonder if your successor would handle the position as well as you have.

I’m not convinced that the civil service model we inherited from Britain is designed to work at all. While we might imagine that what we have is a mirror of the British public service, we would probably be wrong; our systems were set up to govern colonies, not countries, and without fundamental reform from the ground up I doubt they can serve the best interests of nations.