This week I want to broadly look at our national planning tools and their assumed importance in mapping our national destiny. Ever since we began our development plans, since independence, we have set ourselves a variety of objectives for the successive plans that have so far been put in place.
From the very first National Development Plan (NDP I) to the current NDP 10, there have been the general and specific objectives intended to be our targets for both the short and long term achievements.
For this week I want to focus on the long term guiding principles and objectives, for the simple reason that these are the ones that must provide a general framework of where we want to go as nation. These are briefly, the national principles of democracy, development, self reliance and unity.
There are also the national planning objectives of sustained development, rapid economic growth, economic independence and social justice. These two sets of broad goals have been a common feature of all our national development plans.
They have been developed as the guiding principles upon which specific objectives of each NDP are anchored. They are the blueprint of our long term intentions, desires, and national progression. After 10 NDPs are we any closer to achieving in of the above? In addition to the principles, are two critical additions that are meant to be basic in mapping our development path since the late 1990s. These are firstly, the national Vision 2016 and the adopted United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
A combination of the national principles and these two new development interventions is intended to define our national development destiny.
The aspect that I want to point out is that each one of these guides has a set of objectives that we have committed ourselves to achieving as nation.
It is here that I want to raise two aspects of planning that I sometimes feel we pay less attention to (not that we don’t know of).
First, is the inherent assumption that if the combined effect of the above referred aspects is to smoothly guide specific objectives of any of our NDPs, then there must be less contradiction between these sets and the NDP objectives.
The less contradiction there is between these the more likely that we will achieve the specific objectives as set. A close assessment of the specific objectives of all our NDPs (without exception) would show that we have always fallen far short of coming anyway closer to achieving the specific objectives.
Just to remind ourselves, some of the specific objectives we have intended to achieve within the various five year periods are economic diversification, food security, employment creation and economic opportunities, poverty alleviation, self sufficiency in food production, among others.
The end of each of our NDPs has not brought us anyway closer to these objectives and many others not mentioned hear.
I am going to argue that the extent to which we have failed to maximize on achieving the above specific objectives is partly explained by obvious disparities and contradictions of intent between the national principles, Vision 2016 and the MDGs on one side and the specific NDPs objectives on the other. Basic to these contradictions are non complimentarity of the value systems intended and expected to sustain these intentions over a long period of time.
These value systems are inherent within our practiced politico-economic systems and the existent relational interactions of these and those of the international systems.
I will not dwell on this here since it will take another long article; suffice to say that often we tend to assume that the national and international economic and political value systems will necessarily provide a positive, enabling and complimenting environment to our plan objectives.
I will argue that the lack of genuiness on our part, in accepting that these value system, which are in themselves the basis upon which international systems are based on, is in itself self defeating. We set ourselves for failure to achieve our objectives if we, for whatever reason, choose to hope things will always work out. Secondly, I would argue that we also seem to ignore or pay less attention to some of the well known basic planning guides.
Those in the planning fields would agree that at any planning gatherings, meetings, workshops/conferences and courses, talk of the acrinonym SMART guide to developing objectives are a common aspect.
This is to say, our planning objectives particularly the specific ones as contained in NDPs must be Simple, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound, and others would add other aspects to these. My contention is that our plans contain objectives that are not realistic and therefore not achievable within our set five year periods, otherwise how do we explain the successive failures in achieving at least “half” of the set objectives since we started developing our NDPs?
Issues of lack of capacity to implement and procedural bottlenecks are often mentioned as some of the reasons and if indeed they are, it simply says to us that we are not realistic about the capacity of our implementing machinery when we set these objectives.
The basic issue to reflect upon is therefore the extent to which our national planning principles and objectives compliment our specific NDP objectives together with the assumed economic and political values guiding our national development processes.
These will have to include an assessment of whether the Vision 2016 and MDGs are themselves realistic given the time frame we have set for their achievement. If we have failed to achieve any of our NDP specific objectives over the years, it’s partly because some of them were not complemented by the national principles and the national planning objectives as the guiding set of policies.
Equally if we fail to achieve the Vision 2016 and MDG goals, it would be partly because these goals are not realistic and therefore unachievable within the time periods set at both national and international levels.
I will accept that some reasons may have to do with institutional relations and difficulties in coordinating bureaucratic systems, but at that level we will only be dealing with the symptoms or, at minimum, second level causes and not the root causes of our failures. We need to go to the very basics and do the seemingly simple things that we hear of so often in speeches, workshops/conferences and many other fora on planning and objectives setting.
*Molaodi teaches Public Administration at the University of Botswana
