The introduction of the Economic Stimulus Programmes (ESPs) will possibly usher in a new dimension to the management and control of the country’s development processes. The old dimension has had the development processes centralised within the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning (MFDP). These processes includes among others planning, budgeting, finances and auditing. MFDP exercised initiation, direction, guiding, management and control of the country’s development planning and overall responsibility to guide all ministries and sectorial agencies on government priorities and both expenditure and revenue controls. In exercising these functions the MFDP has since independence produced a series of National Development Plans (NDPs) and we are currently in the last year of NDP 10. The contents of these NDPs in terms of national goals and objectives, requisite revenues and their forecasts, expenditures needs and controls and all matters relating to national development processes, while initiated at the different ministries and their sectoral agencies, were all ultimately the prerogative of MFDP to guide and provide direction as well as controlling expenditure. This has been the role of MFDP in been the senior ministry among others in so far as managing and controlling development processes for this nation were concerned. In exercising this function the power and authority in key decision making areas was largely a technocratic issue, initiated, controlled and crafted by the expertise within this ministry for presentation to cabinet and the national assembly for approval.
The envisaged ESPs seem to carry a key departure from the above described scenario. The ESPs has a lot of political zeal and pomp and brings in an element of party controlled development planning which in my view was not necessarily visible though conceptually the party in power could be argued to have always been in charge of the country’s development processes. I am arguing that the choice for a merit based public service and apolitical bureaucracy was in itself a guarantee that expertise would practically always supersede any potential partisan decision making in so far as public policies were concerned. This meant that even if the party in power’s manifesto and related policy documents prescribed the intentions of the party, the ultimate determination of sound and neutral public policy initiation and direction lay on the administrative authority of the experts in the bureaucracy. I want to argue that this was to a large extent the practice of our public administration and its central role in managing and controlling the national development process.
The ESPs will then shift the locus of power and authority to the Party and my sense of it is that this will include a major departure from the old practice and role of MFDP. If indeed the ESPs will have a heavy political party inclination and initiation of related policies has a much more party clout, elements of managing and particularly control aspects, are going to have to be partially or wholly removed from MFDP to possibly the Office of the President. This possible shift will have a defining change effect on the known public administration practices of the last forty nine years. As earlier mentioned the processes of planning, financing, budgeting, auditing and overall management and control of policies defining the ESPs will now be either partially or wholly controlled from outside the functional responsibility of MFDP. This will obviously create potential for divergence and even different perspectives of the direction the development processes have to take. In principle one would argue that these divergent views and difference in opinion are necessary and have possibly been always present even in the old setup, I would argue that the critical difference would be that now it would these would possibly be the choice between bureaucratic prudency and non-partisanship on the one hand and potential political expediency and partisan based public policy making on the other.
I will hasten to mention that for any of the above scenarios to unfold clearly, certain assumptions are implied in my arguments. Firstly, that the old and known practices of managing and controlling the national development processes has largely been the primary role of experts and the bureaucracy or technocrats, whereas the ESPs will usher in a national development process championed more through party manifestos than NDPs. Secondly, that the merit based and neutral decision making by the technocrats will eventually give way to partisan based public policy making which will in turn lead to a much more explicit and decline in meritocracy in the public service. Already we do have quite a number of public service appointments that suggests that meritocracy was not necessarily the guide and trend will eventually dominate public service appointments to key/top positions, purely to reduce and manage the potential divergence of opinions and outlook as referred to earlier. One of the potential result of the ESPs is that to the extent that the party takes a larger share of the responsibility to be more visible in government decision making, it may or ought to develop capacity in key areas of the now known functional responsibilities of MFDP. I see two possibilities here; one through partisan based appointments the party could simply ensure that positions of power and authority in the ministry are given to known party sympathisers or card carrying members to reduce likely expertise based resistance that is based on principles of merit rather than partisanship. The second possibility is the development of a new cadre or party experts in functional responsibilities of budgeting, planning, policy analysts and related processes outside MFDP and potentially in parallel to MFDPs mandate. This would require and present a new locus/source of power that would rival MFDP. In other democracies this would normally see an expansion of the Office of the President, with units or agencies of planning, budget and financial controls established in that office. This of course will bring with it new relational exigencies and dynamics which will redefine patterns of behaviour and power relations in the public service.
The above are just some of the likely eventualities that may see major changes in the operational practices of our public service from what we have known to be a development process largely managed and controlled by MFDP. The question then arises are we sacrificing what we have known to be the prudent and effective management of the country’s planning, finances, budgeting and merit based development policies under MFDP? If so at what cost and gains?
*Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
