If the objectives of the civil service are well set up in a Code of Civil Service civil servants would be able to practise good service as culture to the people without hearing so many holier-than-thou lecturing by their leader politicians causing confusion to the civil servants.
It is time to separate the civil service from the politician so that they do not appear to be taken for granted by the politicians as having to wear their political hat.
At the moment, citizens are being taken to task all the time or most of the time for negative feedbacks on wrong doings or inefficiencies, with civil servants being confused by all the wrongful challenges by the leader politicians affecting their professional judgments and service to the people.
Many civil servants still believe they must deny problems and confront critics like the politicians are doing.
Civil servants are being distracted by the contrary practices - talk one way and act the other way - of the leaders who keep denying problems and malpractices even in cases openly found to be wrong like the NKF or Shin Corp or ministers' self-reward schemes of all kind in the name of retaining talents when they are hardly talents to begin with.
The Auditor General has recently reported many financial losses and irregularities among many ministries including the Law Ministry which has lost a big sum of money over the simple procedure of keying in on the computer a fraction of a dollar.
Is there a commission of inquiry inside or outside parliament (used by Prof Jayakumar to look into NCMP Sylvia Lim's allegations of concern about the need for judiciary independence ) to look into whether this loss is indeed as claimed caused by policy or decision, key-in problem or some other reason.
A code of conduct for civil service will help to segregate mistakes caused by political appointees from those caused by the civil service to preserve civil service professionalism as otherwise civil service will always be used as the scapegoat to cover the mistakes of politicians.
Toxic leader - The phrase was coined by Jean Blumen-Lippman in 2004 and is linked with the debate around corporate ethics and the issue of Accounting scandals
A toxic leader is someone who has responsibility over a group of people or an organization, and who abuses the leader-follower relationship by leaving the group or organization in a worse-off condition than when s/he first found them.