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There is a lot of support among taxpayers and ratepayers for the introduction of performance contracts for the top layers of the civil service and the heads of local authority departments, ensuring that those who run the administration of Government and councils are doing their job well.

The move started with President Mnangagwa putting the Ministers in his Government on performance contracts.

It was then extended to the 21 permanent secretaries, the heads of State universities, the chief executives of State-owned enterprises, very recently to the department heads in local authorities and yesterday to the 463 civil servants who rank as chief directors and directors, and often as result head sections in a ministry.

The idea is to find out who is doing their job properly, who is doing it exceptionally well and who is under-performing.

This is common in the private sector where boards of directors representing shareholders increasingly want to know who in their organisation, and especially among the more senior managers, is performing well.

Although some people talk about dumping those who do not perform this is probably premature.

The first objective is to get people used to having their work measured and having the results of that measurement given more publicity than in the past with far less protection under the rule of confidentiality.

There is also the problem of setting common standards in such a large and heterogeneous organisation as the civil service.

It is difficult enough in some very large companies covering a wide range of activity, and the largest single organisation in Zimbabwe will obviously bring these complications to a new level.

Establishing fair and reasonable criteria for each post, or group of posts, might need adjusting for a year or two so that everyone is in roughly the same boat and we are not comparing someone doing rather well in an easy post and someone managing to just cope with disasters in the most difficult post, yet that second person is probably far more able.

There is also the need to have common standards for judging how close people have come to measuring up to the criteria that have been set. Again different people have different standards of judgment and while a common standard can be developed it is often not instantaneous.

You can get one person who reckons absolute perfection is a passing grade and another who accepts quite a lot of sloppiness. Yet in all fairness we do need some sort of common standard if the system is to be comparing staff.

But these caveats are just needed to avoid taking too drastic action at the beginning of the programme.

We all want to see how it works and we all want to see those in these contracts trying to live up to what taxpayers and ratepayers are paying them to do.

To a large extent many in the higher levels of the civil service have already been through a mill, their promotion ladder, which has required fairly regular assessments of their ability to do the job at the next higher level.

There are the occasional highly qualified outsiders who move into the civil service at a fairly high level, including in exceptional cases permanent secretary, but most high flyers have to climb a step at a time.

The performance contracts might need to be backed by other measures. One problem in private companies and public organisations is that someone who does very well in a particular post is not so wonderful when they are promoted to a higher level.

Usually this is seen and sorted out by having the person act in the higher post for a while and if they do perform well then make that more permanent.

Sometimes it is necessary, without making a big deal of it, to allow a competent person at one level to return to that level if the promotion does not work out.

A performance contract gives something independent to work on, that the person performed above expectations at the lower level and below expectation at the higher level, so there is no real problem in reassignment.

The other problem that performance contracts can help sort out is when we are dealing with nepotism. People being recruited, promoted and posted because of who they are related to is obviously wrong, but it is also wrong to deny the talented relative of a talented person the opportunity to serve.

Considering the gender equality now far more general in education and recruitment there is also the likelihood that people within the civil service might marry workmates, and again it would be wrong to deny the more junior person in such a marriage the chance to shine.

Independent performance contracts can quickly identify those who were recruited and rose on connections from those who were recruited and rose because they were able.

The Government is a complex operation in the modern world and it is vital that both the policy end, the part controlled by Ministers, and the administrative end, the part controlled by senior civil servants, are done exceptionally well by able and hard-working people.

This is the main function of performance contracts, removing a lot of subjective criteria, removing the option that just because someone is senior they should continue stepping up the ladder, and start looking at how well people do the job and ensuring that the very best at each level are the ones who will rise the furthest.