YOUTH activist groups have yet again been heard proposing a lowering of the voluntary retirement age to 50 and setting mandatory retirement at 55 rather than 60 as at present for the public service.

They suggest or, rather, believe that this will create more employment opportunities for younger people, though the proper reason for age limit lies elsewhere. The key to the public service is responsibility and accountability, which diminishes after 60.

Even within the public service, retirement at 60 isn’t altogether mandatory, as it depends on the work or responsibilities in question and whether there are credible, if not better, replacements.

The public service, shielded from fierce competition, could relatively easily and safely retire top level technicians or managerial professionals.

However, hardly any private organisations ever risk impairing their ability for effectiveness or efficiency that easily. The private sector is not under such compulsion; there, many just stay on the job.

It appears that this early retirement theme is a cherished preoccupation of national youth development policy conferences, whose organisers often appear to have set that same theme back in 2007 and at present.

Whether the government seriously needs to seriously consider the revised retirement proposal, presumably to ensure that young people can also benefit from the nation’s resources, is a different matter. And what with the apparently declining performance of youths just out of school, the proposal’s viability looks marginal.

The activist may have thought that the proposal was fairly straightforward for the public sector, while being cautious enough to suggest that the private sector ought to be encouraged to set up a job placement system as used in the public sector – again, to ease competition for young people.

Youths long to see public sector job advertisements used for the private sector as well, whereas the issue isn’t competition. A manager or director in the private sector is responsible only to himself or herself to see that work is done properly; competition doesn’t really apply.

Ideally, anyone has the right to work in the public sector when conditions allow, but there are procedures for making this contest for jobs fair for all.

An additional reason is that hiring for the public service is different from doing so for the private sector, as in the latter the one hiring has to be cock-sure of ability, whereas it is easier to compromise on abilities to hire a relative for the public service.

If one thousand officials, not to say ten thousand, find it easy to engage in such sabotage, it is easy to see how compromised the public service would soon be.

In that sense, the idea of competition isn’t firstly a welfare tenet but hinges on efficiency, in view of the fact that whether or not this or that youth has a job concerns relatives more than it does public agencies.

Were such a fellow to land a job somewhere, hardly anyone else would wish to know if there was competition or not.

Still, if the job the particular person lands is in the public sector, there will justifiably be fears if he or she was indeed the right person, while the issue could seldom arise for private firms.