To commemorate World Mental Health Day today, Sri Lanka Public Service has the highest number of sane staff who have gone insane working there!

World Mental Health Day –  is today 10^th October 2017 –  The Theme is Mental Health in the work force

Please read to the end to understand the most pressing action that is required under this theme. It is simply to allow public servants who want to do an honest job, to do it without the mental harassment  from colleagues, who were appointed as stooges of politicians, who don't allow these dedicated people to assist the public in carrying out their work efficiently. 

Mahinda Rajapaksa governments were the worst culprits who employed/stuffed 800,000 people most of whom are incompetent into the public sector and therefore have prevented good people from working, CREATING a mental health crisis which has NOT been attended to. Some ministers in this government are also adding to this crisis, instead of removing the excreta littering the state sector, so the hundreds of thousands of good people are allowed to actually do the job they are paid to do, and sworn to uphold!

It is no secret that this is why the public service is NOT just bloated, but is dysfunctional! A theme that occurs in all reports, and no one has yet made the connection that the word dysfunctional is akin to MAD!

I believe NOT enough prominence has been given today in the Media to publicize that today is World Mental Health Day. It is possible that there are too many days in the year that have an issue that is commemorated, and so people are a little jaded from having to remember MENTAL HEALTH!

However Mental Health in the Workplace is NOT sufficiently identified in Sri Lanka, and sadly EMPLOYERS are very jaundiced about this issue, not realizing that a healthy work force, including some form of management of Mental Health Issues, to identify and resolve, amongst the work force will definitely improve productivity of the labor force.

Private employers SHOULD understand how important this is for their business as HR is the most important aspect today, to ensure a successful business, and as part of that ensuring that your staff have overcome, by medication or psychological counseling, their personal demons, will produce massive results in terms of productivity improvements. Needless to say those who are contributing to other people's stress have to be eliminated too.

In the public sector in Sri Lanka however, this does not seem to be a big issue, as the level of efficiency of the people who work there, and the belittling of the productive staff into doing nothing means that the Public Sector in Sri Lanka are actually creating Mental Health issues amongst their workforce, merely due to the practices they indulge in to purposely be unproductive. 

This is not well understood by Sri Lanka’s politicians mostly because they suffer from severe mental health problems themselves, that they are unable to appreciate the extent to which the Government Servants/Public Sector are handicapped by their mental health problems, many created due to the work place constraints on productivity.

If the old adage is right, “ in the Sri Lanka public service, a sane man will go insane if he tries to buck the trend and do some honest work for the people!”

It is sad therefore when we commemorate Mental Health, and especially in the work force today, that the Public Sector is accused of being the worst offender in making people mad, and not doing anything to correct the situation. 

It is time the Media get out of their cocoon and look at this aspect very carefully, and recommend that it is the duty of the Government to improve the quality of the service of the Public Sector, if they want their labor force to be mentally healthy. 

THIS MAY BE THE TRICK to sell to the state sector staff, to get all Government Servants to accept change, which they have so far resisted with all their might, to say that unless new procedures are set up to acknowledge good work, give those who perform double promotions and pay raises, everyone will have to be laid off, as there is NO more money to pay the wages. Then there will suddenly be a culture of the most productive doing a good job and they will be able to empower themselves to get rid of the FREE LOADERS, automatically solving the MOST SERIOUS CRISIS facing Sri Lanka today.

Read this link it is worth it to know that this waste of public resources by public servants have existed throughout history and that is NO excuse to clean it up for the people of Sri Lanka today, so we can live in prosperity tomorrow.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/government-officials-abusing-travel-budgets-is-an-old-problem-ancient-in-fact/2017/10/09

Just to remind the reader, it is the bloated, and inefficient public service that is dragging the growth of the economy very badly today, and NOT any of the other problems that the newspapers and media seem to be plugging us with. Like the Bond Scam for example, which pales into insignificance in comparison.

For those lazy to get to the link here it is below:

At least seven  Cabinet-level officials, and a smattering of aides, appear to have abused their access to publicly funded travel. Collectively, these bureaucrats billed taxpayers for millions of dollars worth of private jets, military flights, spousal travel and other questionable expenses.

Yet so far just one of them, former health and human services secretary Tom Price, has been forced to step down.

The White House argues that while Price may have misbehaved, there is plenty of precedent for such extravagant government travel. And the administration is right. Government officials were abusing travel budgets long before President Trump came on the scene.

Like, a really long time before Trump — we’re talking ancient Rome here.

So maybe examining how Roman emperors dealt with the problem can offer insight into how to deal with it now.

During the Roman Empire, government representatives traveling on official business used a state-authorized transportation system, called “vehiculatio.” They received special travel passes (called “diplomata,” and issued by emperors or governors) that allowed them to requisition carts, horses, food, lodging and guides from provincial populations along their route.

Locals were usually compensated at set rates. But otherwise, “the rules varied from province to province, reinforced or modified over time as governors and emperors saw fit,” according to Hunter College classics professor W. Graham Claytor, an expert in Greco-Roman documents.

In practice, this led to a lot of abuse.

Public officials took personal trips disguised as work trips. They spent, and extracted from locals, much more than they really needed. They seemed indifferent to the hardships created by their profligacy and oblivious to more productive uses for the scarce taxpayer resources they were gobbling up.

Sound familiar?

Consider a petition from the villagers of Skaptopara in Thrace (today Blagoevgrad, Bulgaria), sent to Emperor Gordian III in 238 A.D.

The village, renowned for its hot springs, was located between two army camps and a famous market. Villagers complained that soldiers “leave their proper routes” to stay in their town, where the soldiers demanded hospitality and provisions “free of charge.” Governors and other officials also frequented the town, further burdening locals.

Villagers warned the emperor that the abuses might force them to pick up and leave — and take their tax dollars with them:

“If we are weighed down, we will flee our homes and the treasury will suffer the greatest loss; therefore, receiving pity through your divine foresight and remaining in our homes, we will be able to supply the sacred tribute and the other contributions.”

In other ancient correspondence, officials tried to expand their already-generous travel perks.

In one letter, Pliny the Younger (governor of Bithynia and Pontus in 110 A.D.) used flattery to justify a travel pass he had recently issued to his wife, even though she was traveling on a private matter.

It was for familial piety, Pliny explained; surely the beneficent Emperor Trajan would understand. Trajan replied that he did.

When emperors or governors did get mad about such abuses, sometimes they issued financial or other penalties. Often enough, though, the result was another edict reminding officials to please, please follow the rules — and stop making the government look bad!

Here’s one, from Marcus Petronius Mamertinus, provincial governor of Egypt, dated 133-137 A.D.:

“I have learned that many soldiers, traveling through the countryside without a diploma, unjustly demand boats, baggage animals, and men, sometimes taking things by force, sometimes receiving them from the local governors as a favor or service. As a result, private citizens suffer insults and abuse, and the army is accused of greed and injustice. Therefore I command once and for all that the local governors and their lieutenants furnish none of the things given for escort to anyone without a diploma, neither to those going by boat nor those traveling on foot. I shall forcibly punish anyone who, after this proclamation, is caught either taking or giving any of the things specified.”

You can find many similar edicts issued across centuries. Which shows that travel-related corruption and abuse were a recurring problem.

Why wouldn’t this problem go away? Because, as scholar Russell S. Gentry has argued, rulers preferred to cast bad behavior as isolated incidents rather than systemic flaws in an empire that treated provincials as unimportant and afforded government elites relatively little oversight.

Just as, say, Trump might prefer to cast a jet-setting former health secretary as a bad apple not “representative of the spirit of his administration,” Claytor observes.

It took centuries for Roman emperors to realize they needed to make real, system-wide changes if they hoped to curb the wanton abuse of taxpayer resources. How long will it take Trump?