Public policies are conventionally known to be governments’ answers or interventions to citizen problems in a national setup. Developing countries like ours, in particular, tend to spend huge amounts of resources on policy making, analysis and monitoring and evaluation of various impacts that come with every policy put in place. Over the years the government has initiated and implemented quite a number of public policies, all intended to address identified socio-economic and institutional problems that bedevilled our society in varied and diverse ways.
We have had policies that were meant to address the cushioning of adverse living standards, mainly as social welfare packages, there were/are policies intended to mitigate against high unemployment rates, policies that were to empower citizens and create local business entrepreneurs and ultimately provide impetus to the growth of the private sector and many others. This week I want to focus on the policies that I believe have been coined, crafted and designed in good faith but seemingly without utmost assessment of their likely long-term negative impacts or where enough was not done to mitigate against unintended negative impacts that have had long lasting repercussions for citizens’ livelihoods.
Let’s briefly revisit a frame of policy interventions from a general perspective. All policies are known solutions to identified problems facing citizens in their varied formations and often there is a justification why government must intervene in those identified as opposed to many others. Selected policies also have general and specific goals and objectives with clearly stated intended effects envisaged. Critically, any chosen policy interventions suggests that there were other policy options available and these were equally assessed and there is a justification why those were not considered to be the appropriate interventions. This framework should also act to assist government to rationalise the packages of policies chosen, including whether certain policies require consolidation into one programme on account of the intended beneficiaries or clientele. The last consideration is probably more crucial for countries with a population size like ours where having many policies targeting the same clientele may actually prove to be counterproductive and sometimes resulting in resource wastage.
Against this background I will start with a few of the social welfare policies that we have had over the years. In the 1980s when we were hit by that devastating drought, government intervened with a number of drought relief related policies and programmes to assist citizens in a number of ways. Some of the responses were through the drought relief policy that had a range of programmes such as road clearing and de-bushing, dam construction, construction of health mobile shelters and village development committee houses. Parallel to these drought relief programmes were other labour intensive projects such as another road construction under the normal local government funding. Both of these programmes attracted a monthly allowance though of different scales, but they all had unintended impacts that are still felt to this day. The first, unintended but unavoidable impact was the introduction of slightly sustained monthly income to citizens (especially in the rural areas) who have hitherto not relied on money/income to sustain their livelihoods. This meant that now a sizeable number of citizens are introduced to a life of cash as a major source of living but this was not a long term sustainable trend because it only lasted for the duration of drought.
Secondly, and directly related to the first was that small scale farmers who received assistance to plough their fields were the very same clients who had been employed in these other drought projects and therefore they left ploughed fields unattended and agricultural production was greatly affected and partially the drop in the national crop yields production over the years has been directly a result of this trend.
The other policies that seem to follow the same trend are youth related ones that seek to address the high unemployment rates currently facing the youth in this country. We have the youth empowerment schemes, Tirelo Setshaba, Internship, Young Farmers programme and now the Graduate Volunteer Scheme (GVS). All these are targeting the same clientele being the youth in their varied formations and if we add policies under both Local Enterprise Authority (LEA) and Citizen Entrepreneurial Development Agency (CEDA) that benefits youth, then we have a list of policies that seek to target the youth of the country, albeit in varied ways though not always. If we look at the objectives of all these policies and the justification for intervention, it might be feasible to rationalise these into one or two policies that would limit the unnecessary overlaps and consolidate and maximize the utilization of resources in a more productive way. What are some of the long-term albeit unintended negative impacts of some of or all of these policies?
The Tirelo Setshaba, Internship and now GVS, have provided institutions with cheap labour that they do use to their maximum benefit, including avoiding employing fulltime persons. It is emerging that companies and public institutions are taking advantage of these policies to say why employ costly personnel when you can have interns, Tirelo Setshaba and GVS students do the job at no cost at all. The problems of the Youth Empowerment scheme and Young Farmers schemes are known, where beneficiaries simply enter into the scheme for the wrong reasons and end up being absent business owners and the ultimate collapse of the projects. A very dangerous negative impact of the GVS is the potential culture of devaluing education by particularly the young primary and secondary school going kids. Currently teachers and parents are finding it tough to keep these lot focused on their education and now if the GVS is saying to them, there is no point in going for tertiary education, why should kids find it important to pass their primary and secondary examinations.
There is need to start a thorough assessment of these policies and rationalise their objectives and, in my view consolidate some of them into one or two vibrant policies that will address all that is supposed to be the focus of each of these policies individually. These will reduce the current wastage of resources and more importantly potentially increase the positive impacts while either reducing the unintended negative impacts or developing meaningful strategies to mitigate against such. These will avoid policies becoming sources of more problems instead of been solutions to the country’s escalating problems such as youth unemployment.
