A lawyer with deep knowledge of land law tells a story of an unnecessary tangle he got into with a land board. His application was rejected because the land board required documents that are not stipulated anywhere in the law. Apparently, this was long-established practice at the land board and this was given as the reason why he had to submit such documents. At a point where the officers dug their heels in, he decided to play hard ball, battering them with his legal knowledge, including case law. Taking stock of the situation, the land board in question exempted him and only him from such (unlawful) requirement and processed his application.
A year ago, a group of people tried to register an association with the Registrar of Societies, following instructions given by an officer to the letter. The application forms were submitted to a different officer who, after a four-minute or so review of the application, indicated that some information was missing – something the first officer never brought up. A fresh application was re-submitted to a third officer, who stated everything was in order after reviewing the application and promised that the application would be processed in not too long. However, the letter that came in the mail a month later said that the application had been rejected because it didn’t comply with certain requirements – which requirements the three officers had failed to highlight. At this point, the group just gave up.
The common thread that runs through these two anecdotes is the disjunction in operations of the civil service. This is how government operates: even where and when policies and procedures are explicitly laid out in writing, there is always going to be deviation. This deviation happens at institutional, geographic, office or individual level. What one Ministry requires another won’t; within that same ministry, requirements for similar service will differ between an office in Gantsi and another in Mahalapye; within the same office building, there will be different policies and procedures; and which officer you encounter and on what particular day of the week determines what policies and procedures are in effect.
This anomaly happens across the entire civil service – all the more reason the Public Accounts Committee should be using the opportunity of its annual public hearings to ask accounting officers (Permanent Secretaries) about it. No topic is off-limits when these officers appear before the Committee, which is made up of MPs from both the Government Bench and Opposition Bench. As users of government services themselves, members of the Committee would have had the experience of being required to comply with policies and procedures that contradict each other. They would have encountered officers who want to get even with workplace enemies by invalidating what the latter recommended. Of all the questions that Committee members have asked, there is one they typically don’t ask: “Why is it that your Ministry has more than 1000 different policies?” Ironically, some of the operational kinks that are revealed during the hearings attest to use of conflicting policies and procedures within ministries – a problem that the PAC seeks to eliminate.
It is also ironic that the accounting officers themselves are not doing anything about a system that they are victims of at a personal level. Away from their fiefdoms they are treated like everybody else and depending on what they day of the week they seek particular service and what officer they encounter, they also have to deal with a lot of uncertainty.
Generally, there are as many policies and procedures as there are civil servants within a particular office. The latter enables one to make an educated guess of how many policies there are in the civil service. If an office has 15 officers, it would likely have about the same number of diametrically opposed policies and procedures.
As successive editions of the Global Competitiveness Report show, Botswana has a serious labour productivity problem. The use of various and contradictory policies and procedures only serves to compound this problem – some officers may actually seek to deviate from official policy in order that they create opportunity to not work and sneak away from the office. Poor service delivery affects lives and the national economy. An investor who wants to acquire an industrial plot typically has to contend with a slew of unlawful policies and procedures over a protracted period of time.
As Sunday Standard has reported in the past, one aspect of this problem is blatant lawbreaking. One culprit group is the police who are supposed to be custodians of the law but wilfully break it. Nowhere does the law say that motorists can’t give hitchhikers a ride – the law only prohibits charging money for doing so. That notwithstanding, police and bus owners have connived to stop hitchhikers from getting rides at bus stops. With the local police giving a wink and a nod, bus owners actually hire local goons who would be prepared to physically assault those who attempt to catch a ride because the bus company would lose. Nowhere does Botswana say that people should carry national identity cards when they leave their homes but police officers typically stop (especially dark-skinned) people in the street to ask for such cards to prove that they are citizens.
Where policies and procedures that should be similar are not the issue, government department don’t coordinate their operations. Currently, there is a low-scale civil war between the Gaborone City Council and Gaborone police stations over passages in residential areas and speed humps. Town planning regulations require passages between houses to minimise walking distances for pedestrians, not least because walking consumes a lot of energy. However, some residents have, with the support of the local police station, closed off these passages because they harbour criminals. In a related case, GCC erects speed humps as a traffic-calming measure. On the other hand, the police rightly say that these humps are crime hot spots that enable criminals to attack cars slowing down.
Both GCC and the police have very valid points on either issue but one would think that they are domiciled in different countries because they are yet unable to get on the same page on these issues.
