Wednesday, April 23, 2008 Editorials: Humanizing public service
WHAT makes the public develop affection for and respect and confidence in the civil service?
The question is posed after every incident where people feels being unjustly deprived of service he gravely needs from a public office.
Deprivation does not take into account practicality, human need and flexibility in the exercise of office rules and regulations.
Many things present themselves before civil servants, like when they put up faces that project cold detachment, inaccessibility and a forbidding sense of power when they come face to face with clients.
Confronted with this kind of attitude, clients are often prompted to think that the only way to soften things up is to subtly offer cash.
Examples
l There was this client who was made to return almost everyday for a week only to be told that the documents to be processed were missing.
Efforts to locate them supposedly proved futile until he handed cash to one of the personnel for his “services” in locating the missing papers.
When the client came back days later, presto, the documents were already around.
l A Social Security System (SSS) member suffered a stroke.
His monthly pension was deposited in a bank, which stopped payment until he showed proof he was alive or the SSS certifies he is so.
The daughter had to take time off from work to go back and forth to the SSS and the bank.
Finally, a team from the bank went the residence of their client.
They found him alive, but bedridden.
l A ship officer applied for marriage license.
He was scheduled to get married when his company asked him to report for work earlier.
He could not get a marriage license sooner unless he presents a “certificate of no marriage.”
But the National Statistics Office could not release the certificate to meet the ten-day civil registrar’s requirement for the rites to be solemnized.
Flexibility, compassion
When regulations governing the operation of public service agencies results in the clients need not being satisfied, public servants should temper this reality with flexibility of rules and compassion.
This is how civil servants can win the citizenry’s trust and confidence in them.
