One of the major features of public services is the question of an existence of men and women whose service to their countries is of the greatest quality and worthy of not only recognition by governments and members of the public, but also an example to be emulated by those still learning the ropes of what serving the public entails. These are honorable men and women that often emerge amongst the lot to exemplify serving the public interest with honor and effectively closing any possibilities of selfishness, self-centeredness, greed, and general untoward practices that compromise the integrity and virtous image of public services.
I often ask myself as to how honorable are some of the men and women of this country and whether we can embrace a group of individuals‘ commitment to serving this country with honor. We do have what one may say is common usage that cuts across our public service lingo. We have our Honorable Members of Parliament, Honorable Councillors and many others that we refer to as honorable this or that on various official pronouncements. But do we ever pause to ask what exactly we mean or want to attach that tag of being honorable to anyone? Or maybe what is honor anyway? Let’s begin by a simple implication of what public office entails and why we should expect men and women occupying public office to be honorable.
Public office is a place of trust for the public interest and occupants of government offices are themselves trustees of the actualization of public interest through publice service practices and both trust and trustees are created for the purpose of upholding dignified and honorable service to the public. When honorable men and women occupy the public office the expectation is that they provide a benchmark for present and future practices in preserving the country’s good governance practices in their entirity. It is not that we call public officials honorable that they become protectors and preservors of the sanctity of public interest as a socially, economically and culturally sanctioned concept. Public officials, whether elected or appointed, are to carry the baton of that select group of citizens whose service to the nation and/or public is guided by high levels of integrity, ethical conduct and above all, they are devoted to serving the public interest. Embedded in all these is a requirement that public officials ought to carry a high degree of moral standing derived from a very rich relational vigour of institutional processes that guide public officials’ individual and professional growth.
The assumption is that as public officials, the socialisation processes that are part of the larger socio-economic and cultural structures inculcates in us levels of moral standing that would be compatible with our behavior at the work place. We make decisions and choices of whether to remain or not remain honorable partly because of how we were socialised by institutions such as the family, communities, tribes, professional groups, peer groups, religious groups and any other group possessing sanction values of accepted behavior. It is this relational mix of values, that are not necessarily compatible, that requires public officials to manage and reconcile these diverse values to come up with a rich conglomerate that best identifies with serving the public interest.
Obviously it’s never going to be an easy exercise and in part the extent to which public officials remain honorable or not can be explained by our capacity to manage these relational challenges. Positive values that define honor are part of institutional contexts that we grow up learning from our various institutions.
It should be obvious that the importance of serving the public with honor invariably requires the absence of greed, self interest, corruption, and unethical conduct of varying types, misconduct and a host of other practices that are known to negatively impact on any country’s good governance practices. We can gloss over the various activities of our public service and examine the extent to which our elected and appointed public officilas measure up to the test of been men and women of honor. How much do we see the involvement of our public officials in any of the previously mentioned misdeeds, greed, self interest based decisions, corruption, general misuse of public resources like vehicles, supplies, office equipment and others? To what extent do we see public officials striving to preserve those precious government values and the pusuit for good governance practices through fiscal responsibility, transparency, accountability and responsiveness?
The extents to which we can see positive answers to the above can be in part a measure of how honorable our public officials are. The more we have cases of corruption and failure to declare, conflict of interest and abuse of authority and power in the public service, the more we will find it hard to preserve the public interest because upfront of the decision making processes and policy intiation would be consideration for personal enrichment, and pursuit of personal interest as opposed to the public interest. We will have amongst the public officials, men and women who are least concerned about serving their country with honor and if these values are further entrenched in the institutional structures some or all of the negative considerations become the defacto formal guide for moral rectitude. That then simply institutionalizes practices that are not part of the equation in the preservation of honorable behavior that is guided by virtue, integrity and pursuit of the public interest.
Public service is honor for citizens who occupy positions of trust in the structure of government, they must at all times exhibit a high degree of moral uprightness and be proud and committed to serving the public interest. Lets accept the honor of being honorable by showing that indeed we are worthy of been called honorable public officials, whose honor is to serve the nation and be what is expected of us public servants serving the public interest.
*Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
