The rate at which Rwandans are satisfied with how jobs are offered in public service gradually grew from 70.9 percent in 2015/2016 to 82.9 percent in 2020/2021, according to a report of the National Public Service Commission (NPSC).
The Commission presented its Annual Report 2020/2021 to both Chambers of Parliament on November 4, 2021.
"This change in satisfaction rate implies progress in public service recruitment and placement,” said Agnès Kayijire, the Vice President of the Commission.
NPSC said it assessed 16 recruitment reports from 13 public institutions.
The report cited improvements in the recruitment and placement of public servants.
Among them, it showed that the number of people who got jobs based on a database of the candidates who passed recruitment exams but could not get jobs because of limited number of vacancies – increased as they went up from 405 in 2019/2020 to 425 in the financial year under review.
Regarding the level of submitting recruitment exam reports to the Commission, the report showed that it rose from 95.9 percent in 2019/2020 to 100 percent in 2020/2021.
The same report indicated the rate of valid appeals generally went down from 29.4 percent in 2019/2020 to 23.7 percent in 2020/2021. It added that, among such appeals, the share of those regarding civil servant management dropped from 30.8 percent 22.8 percent in the same period.
"This suggests that public entities are making progress in addressing the concerns of their staff,” she said.
One of the factors to which the registered development is attributed is the progress in the level at which public institutions implemented the recommendations of the Commission regarding public service staffing and management. It rose from 85.8 percent in 2019/2020 to 96 percent in 2020/2021.
In addition, public entities sued by members of their staff and the related amounts – including their due benefits and court fines – after the Government lost them declined from 24 entities that were ordered to pay over Rwf949 million in 2018/2019 to 15 that were charged more than Rwf645 million.
MP Jean Rene Niyorurema said that though the cases in which public officials made decisions that are contrary to public service legislation, there was concern that some legal advisors argued their institutions do not respect the advice they give them.
"There was a need for strategies to ensure their advice is respected,” he said.
MP Alphonsine Mukamana said "it is obvious that the recommendations are implemented which prevents the recurrence of mistakes or help reduce malpractices,” calling for ways to extend the Commission’s assessment coverage to many public institutions.
Challenges and way forward
Challenges that remain include public entities that do not or delay responding to workers who appeal to them, resulting in petitioning the Commission.
There is also the fact that some public servants resort to taking their employing institutions to courts and win cases.
However, the Committee expressed concern that there are some public employees who make appeals without valid grounds, which makes it, unnecessarily, spend time and resources in looking into their complaints.
In 2020/2021, the Commission said it received 80 appeals regarding recruitment and placement of public servants. Of those, 21 – representing 26.2 percent – had valid reasons.
Districts accounted for 17 or 81 percent of the 21 valid appeals. According to the report, the reason for this is that the officials in charge of public service recruitment and placement did not comply with the related legislation.
Some of the issues include candidates not being placed in positions after passing recruitment exams, and giving candidates wrong scores in the recruitment exams.
MPs wanted to know areas that needed more efforts so that the rate of satisfaction for the recruitment and placement of public servants be improved further, among Rwandans.
Kayijire said that deploying technology in the entire recruitment process was key to that.
"The Commission realises that upgrading digitisation of public service recruitment including e-shortlisting, and e-examination, will significantly reduce the number of appeals, especially concerning lack of selection of candidates to sit written exams, and dissatisfaction with exam marks,” she said.
For the oral exam (interview), she said we request examiners to have integrity and give the right marks to candidates,” she said, calling for professionalism in interviewing job applicants.
To improve the timely placement of workers, she said that "there is a need to match budget planning with human resource planning so that entities do not recruit staff without finances [to meet their remunerations].”
"Second, appeals of candidates should be quickly responded to because, if one candidate makes an appeal, it even affects the already successful candidates because their placement is halted so as to deal with the petition first. This is done in order to ensure equal opportunities to all applicants,” Kayijire said.