As I reflected on some of the issues that ought to occupy our minds, resources and commitment to develop and make sense of our own situation as nation, I thought of value and merit that we attach to the principle of equality. My thoughts hinged around the role of appointed public officials in ensuring that the political intent of the application and applicability of equality not only makes sense but creates a moral standing that citizens can identify with as they interact with public officials. In the process I could not help but recall the words of one Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. who said “I have no respect for the passion for equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy”. My question then was in identifying the role appointed officials play in the actualization of equality, are we committed to its varied impact and intent or we are merely idealizing this seemingly noble and enviable intent without much commitment to its value and merit?
I don’t pretend to have the absolute answer to this question, neither am I going to argue for a straightjacket assessment of our current practices and their implications on how public servants in this country fares in the process of providing value and merit to equality. I would however wish to raise a few points on the broader issues often visible when talk of equality is put forward in both political and administrative debates. I will of course attempt to bias my attention towards administrative aspects of the issue, but that is only to the extent that I can succeed in separating the two, if at all they can be separated. The world over, there is talk of liberty as a principle to be embodied in the pursuit of democratic practices and a precursor to that struggle has always been equality before the law. This law that prescribes our path to equality is in both the expressed state laws and many other unwritten laws that as individuals and the collective of citizens we choose to voluntarily obey as we interact with one another. Thus we extend the rules of equality beyond just legally enshrined requirements and infuse the rules of moral and socially sanctioned conduct to further enhance our meaning of the democratic spirit.
In the context of the above I wish to argue that the greatest challenge in the practice of processes intended to actualize equality, is to avoid producing inequalities by and through our pursuits for liberty. It is the greatest irony of democratic practices that often we create opportunities for growth and increase of inequality while trying to define the actual content and detail of our democracy and how we ought to enhance equality before the general laws. I will for now give an example of one of the greatest inequalities this country has inadvertantly created even in the midst of not only a political intent to promote equality but in the presence of general laws that we continue to argue that they protect civil liberties. There are cries today of shortage of land and access to it for various uses, but more importantly there are also clear indications of multiple ownership of different uses of land by few individuals, with some owning almost a quarter or close to half of some of our towns and cities. The acqusition of these multiple plots by the few individuals was presumably done under the guidance of our laws that stipulate processes and accessibility requirements for possession and ownwership of land and yet that also created shortages for the lot of citizens who today are still yearning for just one piece of plot.
The above example simply points to another irony of the pursuit for equality and this is that even when we argue that we are all equal before the law and the judicial courts of the country endevour to protect that principle, we cannot hide from the fact that equality does not in anyway suggest that we are not different. It is however assumed that our differences are no justification for our government to treat us differently; hence we are assumed to be equal before the laws. It is our differences in personality, demenour, wealth and potential for individual growth that explains in part, how and why public officials in-spite of the existence of laws and the moral and social conduct grant us unequal access to resources such as housing and land and in the process create very visible inequalities. This happens, inspite of the existence of an expressed political intent to have the protection of liberty through processes created specifically to regulate and enhance equal treatment of citizens.
In brief I am arguing that in our public administration practices we often fail to differentiate between citizen demands and expectations for material equality as having a complete difference from accepting and understanding that factual equality is intrinsically expressed as a given in most societies. We however, cannot be caught in our desire to have public officials actualize and even legitimize our demands for material equality through the application of general laws, for that in itself is a recipe for creating opportunities for violating and compromising our political intentions of not letting factual equality before the law become the very route of increasing inequalities for access and ownership of basic resources, such as housing and land.
I believe some of our conventional and seemingly neutral and legally right administrative practices require further scrutiny as to whether they actually act to limit exacerbating inequalities of varied kinds. In brief I am arguing that we cannot hide behind laws and political intentions to give meaning to our pursuits for equality and accepted democratic practices, even when realities suggests that they may be the very root of increased inequalities in our country. The challenge is for public servants to discern and identify the public administrative processes and practices that though legal and designed to achieve equality as a virtue, they seem to act to actually perpetuate the glaring increase of material inequalities.
It is a journey that we must all pursue in this very 2012, not later.
Dan Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
