The Need for Smart Govt

THE NEED FOR A SMART GOVERNMENT IN OUR DEMOCRATIC EXPERIMENT

Maxwell Oteng*

No matter what political stripes you wear, you have to congratulate Attah Mills and the National Democratic Congress on winning the presidency and parliamentary majority (albeit a slim one) respectively. It’s always impressive and a significant political achievement anytime an opposition party democratically wrestles power from the incumbent given the “incumbency advantages” inherent in the political dispensation of a developing country such as ours. The victory becomes more impressive when the opposition seemed organizationally disjointed with a leadership that seemed pathologically hapless in its efforts at differentiating itself and articulating a winning vision for the country.

In many respects, the high interest shown by the rest of the world in the recent national elections was expectedly understandable given the violence, conflicts and disputes that surrounded similar elections elsewhere in Africa in recent times. In fact, never before had the burdens and prospects of a whole continent been placed on the tiny shoulders of a small country like those of Africa on Ghana’s. So Ghanaians can walk tall for living up to our patently peaceful nature by having relatively peaceful elections. I say this not without cognizance of the tyranny of low expectations the rest of the world has for sub-Saharan Africa,

Ghanaians should take comfort in the fact that the elasticity of our nascent democratic experiment was subject to severe political stress test without breaking. Enduring democracies tend to be organically elastic. In that sense, our democratic pursuit took a significant giant step forward in its march towards maturity, durability and self-preservation. Notwithstanding this, however, we must be wary that the neck-and-neck results of the last elections unveiled the many subtexts of divisions that thread political and ethnic relations in our country. One other thing we must also be wary of is the painstakingly slow pace of effective, efficient and responsive governance that our democratic experiment has wrought on our system of government so far. For some unexplained reasons, we have so far failed to develop a political ethos that calls for accountability and a public-service culture that aims to maximize national interests rather than personal interests. The unfortunate tragedy of the Ghanaian (and for that matter the African) political condition is that public service has come to be viewed as the treasure trove for advancing personal interests and the pursuit of vainglorious status symbols. It seems that no matter who is president and what party is in charge of the reins of government, the country has had to confront continued procession of institutionalized corruption, governmental chicaneries, and vulgar display of opulence and extravagances by politicians in the face of extreme material deprivation amongst a large segment of our people. And all this happens even as we proudly wear our HIPC tag on our chests and continue to rely on the generosity and largesse of the rest of the world to meet our budgetary needs! Why CAN'T we put in place and practice a system of government based on ethical standards, transparency and a selfless devotion to the public good?

In democratic elections, the spoils normally go to the declared winners for better or for worse. But these are not necessarily normal times. Our economy faces extremely severe challenges – unemployment continues to threaten the livelihoods of so many of our citizens, particularly the youth, poverty and income inequality levels are unsustainably high, standard of living of majority of our citizens is still low, our education system is crying out for help, and so on and so forth. So this may be one of the times when some of the spoils should be offered to those on the losing side. Against the backdrop of tenuous political and ethnic relations and enormous economic challenges our country is crying out loud for a different kind of leadership – a leadership willing and able to extirpate parochial partisan politics, heal the wounds of political and ethnic rancor and pursue the virtues of inclusion and bring all Ghanaians together around a common purpose to move the country to a higher and better plane of development.

To move the country to a higher and better plane of development would require that we put in place a more efficient, more effective and more responsive system of governance that has transparency, accountability and competency as its touchstones.

On competency, the checkered history (actually we don’t have to go too far down our memory lane) of our young nation has painfully shown that mediocrity and adhockery are costly. But I am not sure if we have learned anything at all from these painful-but-important history lessons. And that is very scary to me! God bless our civil servants – I am sure most of them mean well for our country and would probably perform to the best of their abilities if the enabling environment were provided for them to do so. Unfortunately, stultifying bureaucratic orthodoxies both underlay and overlay our state and parastatal agencies charged with the sacred duty of executing our national policies.

There is a tendency for us to look at bureaucracies as organically inefficient because of their layered structure of organization. But bureaucracy and efficiency don’t necessarily have been deemed as oxymoronic bedfellows. In fact as Max Weber intimated, 'experience tends universally to show that the purely bureaucratic type of administrative organization... is... capable of attaining the highest degree of efficiency….” Max Weber’s explanation of “legitimate authority” of bureaucracy helps to see why bureaucracy can be a supremely efficient way of administrative organization. According to Weber there are three types of legitimate authority: traditional, charismatic and rational. In traditional authority the source of legitimacy comes from the fact that everyone has always shown obedience to whoever assumes leadership position, and no one disputes his/her authority. Charismatic authority derives its legitimacy from the personal devotion of followers to a 'gifted' leader. The legitimacy of rational authority is rooted in the 'rule of law' – a moral attitude of respect for the law that confers authority onto a leader if he/she can show a warrant in the law. Weber distinguished between goal-rationality (zweckrationell) and value-rationality (wertrationell). Goal-rationality' refers to the effectiveness in serving one's goals whatever they may be. Value-rationality', on the other hand, refers to the rationality of goals and of actions in their relation to some value. Viewed in the context of value-rationality, bureaucracy is in fact the division of labor applied to administration. And as Adam Smith observed several years ago, division of labor is the main lubricant that greases the wheel of efficiency.

So the question is how do we get our bureaucratic institutions to be more competent and efficient in their delivery of the public good. There are several things that can be done. First competency must start from the top and trickle down to the bottom. Our ministerial appointments must be based on competency instead of on strict party loyalty. In a similar vein, promotions and other rewards must be based on performance and not solely on ‘seniority”. Most of us have had one or more unpleasant experiences with one governmental agency or another. Let me briefly make mention of two of that factors that promote non-performance and inertia at our bureaucracies: the Ghanaian Time Mentality (GTM) and its avuncular “Big Men’ Mentality (BMM) that permeate our bureaucracy corners and the larger national culture. Because of these twin-mentalities, among other things, our public managers have little regard for time management and personal responsibility. Scheduled meetings and appointments, for example, can start one hour late because of a Big Man’s personal reasons, and nobody eyebrows will be raised. I recently visited a couple of ministries and was shocked to see appointments start more than one hour late and workers just lounging around and gossiping about nonwork-related things seemingly unmindful of the fact that they were doing so at the expense of our national productivity. Therefore we need to institute policies of an attitudinal change aimed particularly at compelling top- and mid-level personnel to exhibit exemplary behavior of punctuality and personal responsibility.

One way to do this is through intra-department (or intra-agency) two-way evaluation system that gives both management and junior staff an opportunity to anonymously evaluate and provide feedback to each other. All too often, the feedback mechanisms in place (if any exists at all) at our institutions are unidirectional and top-down.

Another way is for governmental agencies to adopt results-oriented budgeting and management approach. This approach shifts the emphasis away from how much money to spend towards what is actually being. Technological innovation can play an important role in this regard through network effects. Think, about how access to reliable e-mail and Internet services, for instance, can improve productivity at the workplace! This is not just some fancy academic proposition. In fact many government ministries in both developed and developing countries have performance targets in strategic and performance plans. The main objectives of this approach are to achieve efficiency and effectiveness, improve resource allocation decision-making, improve transparency and accountability, and achieve budgetary savings. Results-oriented approach encourages within an organization collaborative work, self-evaluation and monitoring, and a willingness to adapt to circumstances along the way.

It’s one thing to have a democratic system of government, but it’s another thing to make the system more participatory, more engaging and more efficient. This requires talented people to lead our public management processes and an informed citizenry to hold political leaders’ feet to the fire. To achieve these ends, we must expand the pool of talents from which we appoint our public leaders and managers. However, the drafters of our constitution, in their infinite wisdom to copy from other countries without regard to its appropriateness for our local conditions, decided to include a provision that required majority of ministerial appointments to come from parliament. This is a bad provision because not only does it interfere with robust parliamentary debates, but also it unduly shrinks the talent pool from which we select our ministerial leaders. As a result, we don’t normally end up with our first-best choices but rather second-best or even in some instances third- and fourth-best choices of public officials. The other unintended consequence of this bad provision is that it dilutes the quality of parliamentary discourses and disrupts the equipoise among the various branches of our government, making an already powerful executive branch too omnipresent. Parliamentary (at least a significant part of it) therefore becomes an appendage or puppet of the executive branch, which is antithetical to democratic checks and balances.

This is not an insurmountable constitutional conundrum. In fact, it’s mind-boggling that no-one has provided an amendment to address the issue. But even without a constitutional amendment, there are ways to innovatively circumvent the constitutional challenge without breaking the constitutional requirement. For instance, a president that has the interest of the country at heart and cares religiously about enlarging the national pie for all citizens (one would like to think that that’s the paramount reason anyone would like to be president) wouldn’t make cabinet/ministerial appointments just an exercise of job-for-the-boys (and girls). Instead he/she would find innovative ways to expand the talent pool by, for example, appointing some talented opposition MPs to the cabinet; and or appointing skilled non-MPs to deputy and other lower-level positions where most of the important work is done anyways. Either way he can satisfy the afore-discussed constitutional requirement for ministerial appointments.

One of the biggest responsibilities of any government is the ability to mobilize and sustain the support of the people around the challenges and opportunities they must confront. And whether a government will be successful in the challenge depends on the amount of social capital it is able to cultivate from among the people. At the epicenter of the cultivation of social capital is trust of the citizens in their government. Trust is earned, and it is earned by being incorruptible, fair-minded, and transparent about the conduct of affairs. These are the qualities we should all demand of our government and public officials. One way to engender transparency and also reduce the level of corruption in the public square is to enforce a recurring public declaration of assets of public officials. We can do this by using the Internet and citizen hearings at all levels – local, regional and national. Anybody being considered for ministerial positions must be made to declare their assets; then there will be a hearing about these assets at the constituency that person represents; this should be followed by a regional hearing and finally a national hearing open to the general public. I will suggest that declaration of assets must be done more frequently – maybe on yearly basis. In addition to these hearings, let us publish the assets in all known information mediums including a government-maintained website that would solicit comments from all Ghanaians that have the ability and choose to do so.

Running a smart, competent and responsive government requires a willingness to think outside the proverbial box and experiment with new ideas. Politicians have a tendency to think of themselves as Avatars with some providential predispositions that give them a monopoly over wisdom. But the truth is that no one person has a monopoly of ideas about how to make our country better. So the government should not hang on its ideological ideas that may hamstring our journey forward as a nation. Rather, it should provide an inclusive framework of governance that embraces and encourages diversity of ideas – ideas that may just work. The Internet can once again be used to achieve this purpose. In my imagination, here is how it will work. The governments creates a website that will be exclusively devoted to debating ideas for development. The government puts out its idea/s about any particular issue and allows for free debate about that idea/s. The government should also freely solicit ideas from the general public about any issue and then allow the solicited ideas to go through the gauntlet of public debate. In so doing the good ideas (both from the government and the public) will survive and the bad ones will wilt away. An auxiliary way to generating ideas while encouraging citizen participation in our democracy is through the use of town-hall (informal grassroots public) meetings. Town-hall meetings can be fertile sources for practical ideas, especially if politicians are willing to do the listening and the people encouraged to do the talking. Some government agencies are gradually beginning to make use of the Internet to provide information. We should ask them to provide a forum for ideas, suggestions and debates. In fact, all government agencies at the national level should be required to have websites with forums for ideas, suggestions and debates. All ministerial agencies should also be required to hold a certain number of town-hall meetings each year.

*Brief bio: A citizen of Ghana, currently resident in California, USA. I have a PhD in Economics