The Dibotelo Report doesn’t quite use “social media” but anyone familiar with labour productivity within the civil service (or lack of it) will make such inference.
The Dibotelo Report summarises (mostly) oral and written submissions that were made to it over a period of six months as its 19 commissioners travelled the length and breadth of Botswana. Chaired by former Chief Justice Maruping Dibotelo, the Commission has produced the Report of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Review of the Constitution of Botswana.
One of the recurring themes during these public hearings was labour productivity in the civil service.
“Concerns were raised over poor performance and indiscipline of government officials, resulting in poor productivity,” says the Report, adding in another part that “in order to improve productivity, there was proposal to limit use of electronic gadgets during working hours in public offices.”
The gadgets in question would be the office telephone and the Internet-enabled electronic gadgets which have become the enemies of labour productivity in the civil service.
One too many civil servants think nothing of using the work telephone to make personal calls for long periods of time while members of the public they are supposed to serve wait. The culprits’ level of brazenness is such that their voices are often loud enough for members of the public they keep waiting to actually hear every word of the personal things they say on the phone.
The other, more problematic gadget, is the smart phone. Through this gadget, civil servants access social media, namely Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and TikTok for frivolous purposes. That Botswana has one of the highest Internet access rates in Africa makes this problem even more acute.
In the particular case of the civil service, one too many culprits devote more time and attention to social media than to the work that they are paid for. Last year, we carried a story about a Maun man who reported burglary to police officers – who were engrossed in social media to pay him full attention. On bad days, some Gaborone police officers assigned to control traffic at the Airport Junction intersection, get engrossed in iPhone screens than on the rush-hour traffic clogging the roads.
While the Dibotelo Report understandably singles out civil servants, poor work ethic cuts across the board. That explains why, year in year out, the Global Competitiveness Report scores Botswana’s national labour force among the worst in terms of work ethic.
Such work ethic is also found in the private sector and even under the direst circumstances. Someone who underwent an angioplasty procedure at a prohibitively expensive private hospital in Gaborone says that he was left under the care of a health assistant in a recovery room following the procedure. A nurse from the operating theatre instructed the assistant to release a certain amount of pressure from a small device that had been put around his wrist to stem bleeding where a cut had been made. This was to be done every five minutes until all the pressure was expelled.
The assistant was stationed behind a reception desk and from his prone position on a stretcher, the patient could see that the assistant was entertaining herself with something on her iPhone. Thankfully, the patient could also see the wall clock behind her. The assistant was still scrolling through her phone when the first five minutes elapsed and he had to alert the assistant to come over and release some of the pressure. Similar reminders had to be done the second and third time.
Participating in a Botswana National Productivity Centre symposium years ago, a senior government official who had worked for a period of time in the private sector, said that her experience had been that there is actually no difference in work ethic, between workers in the public sector and those in the private sector. That however, might be an overstatement because the private sector has a tolerance level for poor work ethic in employees. If such work ethic breaches that level, the private sector would collapse.
On the other hand, the public sector is overly tolerant of poor work ethic. In part, the latter explains why government health facilities can go without life-saving medication for months on end. Even when there is no such shortage, there is always a slew of service delivery issues. The latter notwithstanding, the Ministry of Health is still operating and no one ever loses their job on the basis of poor work ethic. Ultimately, the issue is not that civil servants have a poor work ethic but that they are rewarded for it.
Interestingly, the culprit could be the man who made Botswana what it became in its glory days – President Sir Ketumile Masire. Under his predecessor, Sir Seretse Khama, Botswana had one of the most efficient civil services in Sub-Saharan Africa. That changed in the early 1990s when, according to an academic paper by Professors Mpho Molomo and Brian Mokopakgosi, the Botswana Democratic Party began “to reward party activists and supporters by appointing them to positions in the diplomatic and civil service, and the councils, land boards, and tribal administration.” Both men were at the University of Botswana when they wrote that paper. Overtime, Masire’s political misadventure rippled across the civil service, in the process dumbing down standards and affecting morale.
To his credit, Masire tried to cultivate the right work ethic in workers, in one respect, by establishing BNPC. In his last interview before his death in 2017, Masire told Sunday Standard that BNPC was inspired by the experience of the Four Asian Tigers – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Between the early 1960s and 1990s, these countries maintained exceptionally high growth rates (in excess of 7 percent a year) and rapid industrialisation. By the 21st century, all four had developed into advanced and high-income economies, with Singapore becoming a world-leading international financial centre. With the hope that this economic miracle was also possible for it, Botswana established BNPC through an act of parliament in 1993. The Centre’s statutory mandate, is “to enhance the level of productivity awareness as an advocacy function and to enable individuals and organisations through training and consulting to be productive and competitive.” Even though he accepted that BNPC “didn’t work as well as we had hoped”, Masire said that he had no regrets about establishing it and that the labour productivity problem in the country would have been a lot worse without it.
Oddly and as it did with many more issues, the Dibotelo Report didn’t respond to the particular proposal that the use of electronic gadgets in government offices should be limited.
