Jakarta Vice Governor Basuki T Purnama assesses that the amount of civil servants in the environment of Jakarta Provincial Government is too much. Thus, he plans to downsize them from currently 72,000 civil servants to 50,000 civil servants. At this time, Basuki has downsized about 1,000 positions.

Unruly civil servants will be fired. I like that. If waiting for them to retire, it will be too long

“The amount of civil servants in Manila City is only 17,000. For Jakarta Provincial Government, the amount is at least under 50,000, ideal. The point is that we will downsize,” he stated, Tuesday (9/9).

According to Basuki, this downsize will be done gradually by reducing new recruits only to replace the civil servants who are going to retire. As for civil servants who are proven committing corruption, they will be directly fired.

“Unruly civil servants will be fired. I like that. If waiting for them to retire, it will be too long. We hope there would already be a new model in 2015. If by then thing were running well, we will downsize again,” he said.

Basuki admitted that he is currently developing a new model to look for the right officials to be stationed in certain positions. The way is by asking civil servants with no ranks (plain staff) to propose themselves for certain positions. Then, test will be done to know whether they fit in those positions or not.

“95 percent of city’s civil servants don’t have position. Whereas, many of these staffs are dedicated and clever, but they just never been given positions. So, we give them opportunity to rise up. We instruct them to take the test, what they wanted to be, write it down,” he uttered.