The Director General of the Human Resource Management Office (HRMO), Ansu Tucker, has said that the 2021 Manpower Hearing undertaken by his Office will look at the critical vacancies within the civil service. Speaking on employment issues in Sierra Leone, he said that government is the largest single employer and that the private sector is very low and fledgling, so in effect everybody looks forward to government to provide jobs. “Government has the capacity but they cannot employ everybody, it is not unlimited it has to plan within its resources as that will enable it to know how they will employ” he said.
In 2018, there was a moratorium on recruitment and only recruitment that was essential was undertaken and the request was sent to the Office of President for approval after receiving concurrence from Ministry of Finance. But, despite that government he said still recruited several health workers and professionals in several key ministries because they were critical to the workforce. “When we plan, we look at the critical vacancies, jobs that have scarce skills and very essentials like medical officers, engineers, confidential secretaries in the civil service. We also have to build up our middle level manpower, it is very weak, so we are trying to improve it, so we consider those vacancies very critical” he explained.
In the last year procurement officers, economist, budget officers, human resources officers and administrative officers were recruited, all that he said happened because it was planned for and as they plan for the 2021 Budget the vacancies that will be advertised would have been planned for. “The civil service have a workforce of about 16,000 employees which is different from the wider public service such as the police, military and subvented agencies. Last year we had over a thousand employees that were retired” he said.
By Zainab Iyamide Joaque