Jeffry Sachs, the Columbia University economic guru and advisor to the United Nations, spoke to the President of the Dominican Republic and a select audience of high-ranking officials in the Presidential Palace last night. In his talk he pointed out that the politicizing of the bureaucracy is a major hindrance to the development of the nation. He called for the political parties to get together to guarantee the job stability of the bureaucracy, since many of the people were prepared or educated with government funds. Sachs did not mince words as he said that he could not comprehend how a change of government would involve the substitution of the director of a Public Health clinic in a barrio or rural area. He called for a system that would allow government workers to obtain and keep their jobs on merit, not the triumph of one or another political party.
Speaking in the Cariatides Salon of the Presidential Palace before a group of government officials that were presenting their preliminary reports on the fulfillment of the Millennium Objectives within their departments, Sachs called the situation “atypical.” He said that “what we (the DR) need is management by excellence, not management by whoever wins the elections.” He held forth that basic government administration should not depend on who wins an election, but rather on qualified personnel.
He recalled that while he was in Bolivia in 1985, there was a change of government and 45,000 people were put out into the streets. A few years later there was a change of government in Japan and just 13 officials were asked to step down. The Bolivian case is a prime example of governmental instability.
Sachs called for a system of contracting and hiring of government workers based not only on their capacity, but also on their endeavors and responsibility and supervision. Sachs went so far as to call for community supervision of government funding for projects in order to obtain higher returns for the money invested.
He was also very unhappy with the high rates of illiteracy and infant mortality in the Dominican Republic. At the end, Sachs told the audience that there are objective indicators that there is some type of crisis in the public administration that has to be taken on as a long-range goal.