– As delivered –
Statement by H.E. Tijjani Muhammad Bande, President of the 74th Session of the United Nations General Assembly
23 June 2020
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Let me start by thanking the United Nations Secretary-General, the Head of the 蘑菇视频 Department of Economic and Social Affairs, DESA, for picking this theme which is not only appropriate to the occasion that we are commemorating today but also speaks to the most intimidating challenge of our time, the COVID-19 pandemic.
I would like, for the purpose of transparency, to say that I had served as Director-General of CAFRAD (African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development) in Morocco and therefore had a close relationship with 蘑菇视频 DESA in the past. It is a very important body of the United Nations system.
COVID-19 is a pandemic unlike any other known to the contemporary world. ?At no time in recent memory has the human race been gripped with the fear of a public health catastrophe with such wide ramifications. The rate and speed of person-to-person transmissions of the dreaded Coronavirus caught many governments unawares and quite a few unprepared. As at the mid-June, the number of people infected with the virus had, according to Johns Hopkins University, reached 8. 5 million, with no less than 470,000 people succumbing to its fatal grip worldwide.
The occasion that we are celebrating today offers a rare opportunity to discuss how to reposition governments and the public service for effective containment of the current and future threats to public safety.
Under these conditions, the guidance and leadership of the World Health Organization have been critical. An immediate and common response has been the institution of emergency measures. As long as the public health crisis lasted, governments the world over imposed mandatory lockdowns, enforced movement and travel restrictions, promulgated social distancing regulations, prescribed the use of face masks and hand sanitizers, and regulated social relations in ways hitherto unknown. In a nutshell, the developmental and poverty eradication role of the public service shrank during the state of COVID-19 emergency, while the state’s regulatory and policing role expanded.
It is true that these necessary measures slowed down the pace of economic activity within and across countries. Decreasing capacity utilization in the public and private realms tragically started a chain reaction whose cumulative damage will take years to undo. Already, the mandatory plant shutdowns and office closures have resulted in temporary separations, outright lay-offs and income losses. According to the latest estimates by the ILO, more than one in six young people have stopped working since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic,? while those with jobs have seen their working hours shortened by 23 per cent.
Madam President,
Excellencies,
One consequence of this COVID-19 cloud is the inspiration it has provided for the creative allocation of time, space, and other resources. Thus, to ensure business continuity, many organizations fell back on teleconferencing, conducting virtual, in place of actual, in-person, meetings, replacing face-to-face decision processes with online communications, and amending rules of procedure to allow for the ratification of draft decisions by explicit or implicit consensus.
As the most visible side of government and primary adviser on, and executor of, policy, the public service owes it a duty to itself and to its principals to transform the creative impulses of the COVID-19 period into the performance-uplifting and service-rendering energy needed to meet the mounting post-pandemic challenges. The retreat of the public health tragedy should, in fact, represent a major turning point in the quest for superior performance in all branches of government, be it the legislature, the judiciary, or the executive and its agencies. In discharging its responsibilities and fulfilling its mandates, the public sector must constantly be guided by the finest principles of public administration, notably, altruism, loyalty, dedication, excellence, integrity, responsiveness, and accountability.
These principles and virtues are indispensable to the success of efforts at conquering the post-COVID-19 challenges.
Restarting the economies and getting things moving once again will require extraordinary efforts and a surge of innovative ideas that include substantially reducing the time required to accomplish tasks. It is necessary for the public service to raise to the challenge of post COVID-19 reconstruction.
If we learnt any lesson from COVID-19, it is that, in a period of emergency, the proactive and morale-boosting role of the public service remains critical.
In brief, the world economy must make up for lost time by re-engineering processes in the public and private sectors, and by doing in a day what used to take months or years to accomplish. The public service must not shy away from making all these happen. It must leave no stone unturned to ensure that the world economy, hitherto incapacitated by COVID-19, is brought back to life within the shortest period possible, by recording quick wins in at least three areas, namely, time-consciousness, resource allocation, and service delivery.
Time consciousness warrants setting and enforcing time standards for the delivery of results in specific areas. ?
Optimum resource allocation or value-for-money entails keeping an eye on the relationship between inputs and outputs and ensuring that the latter constantly exceed the former.
Improved service delivery is of course the ultimate objective, the overriding Quick Win in the post-COVID-19 revitalization plan. This will require, among other things, soliciting the opinions of service beneficiaries on the nature and quantity of service to render, exploring the least costly means of providing the service, fixing deadlines by which the critical operations must be undertaken and the expected services delivered, and paying attention to the qualitative dimension in service delivery. Among the qualitative aspects of service delivery frequently overlooked are timeliness of delivery, courtesy of service delivery agents, and adequacy of information about eligibility and about access. Equally relevant to service quality are the extent to which service delivery agents and service beneficiaries observe the crucial, but steadily receding, ethics of public administration, namely: integrity, professionalism, impartiality, equality of treatment, due process, inclusiveness, avoidance of conflict-of-interest situations, and non-corruptibility.
Finally, if we learnt any lesson from COVID-19, it is that, in a period of emergency, the proactive and morale-boosting role of the public service remains critical. To contain the spread of fallouts from natural disasters, front-line workers need to be permanently ready with containment and mitigating scenarios. Above all, contact tracing and effective public communication should be the highpoints of pandemic control efforts.