Necessary civic revolution: Bureaucratic inertia, system change and national awakening (Punorudaya)

Public servants with compromised integrity venture beyond their expertise in servitude to their political masters, regardless of the consequences to the country. Politicians heed their advice over real subject experts. For example, a prominent public services medical doctor advised a former president on an overnight organic farming revolution. The president heeded his false advice, which exposed the doctor's stupidity, destroyed farmers’ livelihoods, and plunged the country into a severe food crisis. This toxic combination of professional hubris and political servility is endemic across many public institutions.

- By Jude L. Fernando

Paralleling this, agriculture experts in public institutions prostitute themselves as ‘consultants’ to the purely profit-minded agricultural industrial complex, hijacking the global demand for organic food while compromising national food security and farmer livelihoods. These experts are joined by the “visible hands” of economists in the public sector who, imprisoned in failed and misleading economic doctrines, solely blame political failures for the shortcomings of their policy prescriptions. They wield enormous intellectual and political power over almost all public sector functions according to the dictates of neoliberal institutions, undermining the sovereignty of public policy-making. Their consultant reports are not even available to their institutions or colleagues, but to the institutions they serve, and who impose power over the sovereignty of public institutions.