TITLE:
Injecting Key Elements into the Professionalization of the Liberian Public Service to Optimize Service Delivery
AUTHORS:
Teeko T. Yorlay
KEYWORDS:
Government Entrant or Joinee, Orientation, Onboarding, Institutional Socialization
JOURNAL NAME:
Voice of the Publisher,
Vol.10 No.4,
December
16,
2024
ABSTRACT: This paper discusses and analyzes the problems that new government entrants or joinees: presidential appointees, elected officials, consultants and civil servants face as they work in public service in Liberia. The Government of Liberia seems to lack an established process of systematically undertaking an onboarding process that ensures institutional/organization socialization of institutional strangers to become effective institutional insiders who are conversant with and cognizant of and use the rules and regulations as well as institutional cultures, norms, traditions, ethics and values aligned with relevant laws to properly guide their modus operandi and modus vivendi in public service. As such, some of these public servants who take their offices and are told that “this is how we have been doing it before” plunge themselves into their responsibilities, making inconsequential errors that with time compound and metamorphose into colossal public service misdeeds that inescapably entangle them in audit reports for which public service culminates unfortunately into public torment. Not everyone who enters public service embarks on a journey to line his or her pocket. However, without a proper orientation and onboarding process that ensures that new government entrants or joinees are at least informed about the dos and don’ts as outlined in the Standing Orders of the Civil Service, the Public Financial Management Law (PFM Law), the Public Procurement and Concessions Law (PPCC Law), the Code of Conduct (CoC), Government of Liberia Revised Travel Ordinance and other instruments, the avalanche of mistakes that they make will get them stuck in the barbed wires of reports of the Auditor General (AG) of the Republic of Liberia. Hence, this paper calls for self-education on the part of the joinees as well as a program by the Government of Liberia that helps to provide proper and adequate orientation.