BY MICHAEL ARNOLD

Amid reports of a gross shortage of manpower in a number of government departments, Personnel Management Secretary, John Kali, has come forward to explain the freeze on all public service recruitment.
According to Mr Kali, the freeze has been in effect since 2015, and was initially taken as a measure to control government expenditure on personal emoluments.
“I’ve imposed the recruitment freeze on all public service departments and provincial administrations because of a cabinet directive. Cabinet gave me the directive to impose this restriction, simply because we don’t have the money to engage more new staff,” he said.
The freeze on recruitment into the public service has placed a strain on many government departments, one example of which has been Communication and Information, which, according to the Secretary Paulias Korni, is supposed to have up to 55 staff, but is currently operating with less than 30.
“What they can do, is that if there are vacancies in their departments and they are funded vacancies, then they can come and see me. The budget is already there, so we can allow them to go and recruit, but only if their vacancies are funded,” said Mr Kali.
“If there are people in their organisations that are unattached and if they can be redeployed, then what they should do first and foremost is to redeploy unattached people to those funded vacancies so that they can be able to do the job.
“We still maintain a ban on all restructures or reorganisations, simply because we don’t want any additions to the payroll that we have. So our way of reducing the pay bill is to start with natural attrition by getting rid of people who have reached the retirement age,” he said.
Despite the current freeze on recruitments, Mr Kali said that he has been mandated to grant exceptions for recruitment into key priority sectors.
“There are of course exceptions. I am allowed by cabinet to exercise my powers under the Public Service Management Act to give exemptions for key priority sectors like health, education, law and order and infrastructure. I’m happy to allow them to go out and recruit because those are priority sectors. They need to fill these positions to be able to deliver services,” Mr Kali said.