Presidential appointments of senior government officials usually face meticulous scrutiny from the public and the parliament. The latest round of appointments made by President Park Geun-hye must be even more tightly screened because the posts carry extra significance.
The appointments involve the new Ministry of Public Safety and Security created in the aftermath of the Sewol ferry disaster, and such key offices as the arms procurement agency, which has recently been battered by high-profile corruption scandals.
In view of this, Park should have taken more care than ever to put the right people in the right posts. There are some concerns in this regard as Park again stuck to her usual means of appointing senior officials.
Park picked retired military generals for the two top posts of the Public Safety Ministry, in yet another show of her preference for candidates with military backgrounds.
Park In-yong, nominated to head the ministry, is a former Navy admiral, and its No. 2 post went to a former Army three-star general who most recently served as vice minister of safety and public administration.
Park might have thought that a retired Navy admiral would be the right man to take the helm of the ministry created in the wake of the Sewol disaster, in which a botched maritime rescue operation was one of the major reasons 304 lives were lost.
One may wonder whether Park gave much thought to the agency’s importance in upgrading the nation’s disaster and emergency response systems, and considered its role in preventing them and improving the overall safety culture in society.
It would have been better for Park to tap a civilian expert or a career bureaucrat for the No. 2 post of the Safety Ministry, which is responsible for about 10,000 officials and safety staff, including firefighters and maritime police.
Another familiar aspect of Park’s latest appointments is that she gave some of the senior posts to people with whom she has personal ties.
Park installed an ex-Samsung executive to the top post of the Ministry of Personnel Management, which was also created in line with the government reorganization prompted by the sinking of the Sewol ferry.
We hope that, as Park’s spokesman said, Lee Geun-myun will be able to push for innovation in government personnel affairs, utilizing his experience as the chief human resources officer of Samsung Electronics and injecting fresh vigor into the civil service.
But we also hope that Park did not choose him only because he contributed to her presidential campaign, as a member of a panel promoting her policy on job creation. If so, it would be expecting too much to hope that the new agency will fulfill its mission to, among other things, reform government workers’ pensions and curb the revolving-door appointments that are partly to blame for the Sewol tragedy.
The same will be true of the new head of the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, where a string of graft scandals forced the exit of its commissioner. The new commissioner is Park’s college classmate.
We should not question the qualifications of the appointee, Chang Myung-jin, simply because he attended the same university as the president, but the fact that he spent his entire career in the Agency for Defense Development makes us wonder whether he is the right man to tackle the deep-rooted corruption in the nation’s defense acquisition programs.
All this requires the National Assembly to thoroughly check the ethical standards and competence of the appointees, especially the nominee for the head of the Safety Ministry, who is subject to a parliamentary confirmation hearing.
