The draft of the new Decree developed by the Ministry of Home Affairs clearly stipulates that the Chairman of the Commune People's Committee will have the right to appoint, dismiss, transfer and discipline heads and deputy heads of professional departments under the Commune People's Committee.
This is a strong decentralization step, reflecting the spirit of administrative reform, bringing power closer to the people.
Because the deeper decentralization and delegation of power to commune-level authorities is a change in the thinking of state management. The commune chairman, from implementing the instructions of superiors, will now be the one who decides on the key personnel of the local professional apparatus.
Awarding many powers, including the right to appoint, is a great trust of the Central Government in the grassroots level, but it is also a great pressure.
In reality, many key cadres at the commune level today come from regular administrative civil servants, have not undergone in-depth training in human resource management, and have not been standardized in human resource assessment and use skills.
If we only give power without "assigning capacity", it is easy to fall into two common situations: either cowardly, afraid of collisions, not daring to decide; or affectionate, lacking principles, leading to incorrect appointment, using people incorrectly, affecting the quality of the apparatus.
When the commune chairman is assigned the right to appoint or dismiss, it also means being responsible to the people and the agency for inspecting the effectiveness of the professional apparatus.
Therefore, there needs to be a mechanism to publicize the appointment process, make evaluation criteria transparent, and especially cross- supervision from the People's Council, from the authorities of the province and city, to avoid the risk of turning the empowerment into "assigning positions" to "family members" and then "asking a burden" to the entire apparatus.
Another challenge is the gap between localities. Although the commune chairman is the same, in a disadvantaged rural commune and in a large inner-city ward, there will be very different conditions, qualifications, environment and pressure.
Therefore, when the law empowers the same, the policy of training, supporting and standardizing cadres also needs to be flexible, suitable for each group of subjects, avoiding responsibility-based scratching while ignoring the difference in actual capacity.
The authority of the commune chairman to appoint heads and deputy heads of professional departments in the current context is an opportunity to verify the maturity of the grassroots government.
But opportunities only promote value when accompanied by synchronous preparation: in terms of institutions, in terms of staff capacity and in terms of inspection and supervision mechanisms.
Assigning authority without any lax control and assigning responsibility but must accompany in capacity, that is the only way to prevent decentralization from becoming dispersed, and to make the commune-level apparatus truly capable of meeting modern management requirements in the new period.
