As individuals and groups of societies, communities and various types of organizations, we often vary our decision making exploits between certain clear-cut principles that we have overtime accepted as the basis for a sanctioned social order that is generally acceptable and our ability to be pragmatic enough to treat each event, incident on its merit. These two are broad parameters within which we could assess the basis of our decision making in the varied socio-political bodies, both as individuals and as collective. I am going to throw in the element of individualism as another related consideration of why we individually or collectively make certain decisions, especially the type of decisions that seem to negate what we may have long held as guiding principles of our individual and collective processes of decision making. The above is argued as a conceptual explanation of events as they unfold in both our public service and political landscape in this country.
We continue to hear of, and observe certain decisions undertaken by public officials and thus far we have not been short of a hoist of decisions taken by our political parties in varied circumstances. As a prelude to the discussion let me state that as individuals, groups and types of organizations, we normally look for sets of precepts to give us guidance on our efforts to solve and deal with problems and challenges of our time. I also want to mention that upfront in dealing with our decision making choices and the rationale as to why we decide as such, is also a function of what meaning we give to some of the terms and concepts we associate with our efforts to solve problems and challenges that may be facing us. This is critical to understand because as individuals and groups (formal & informal) we often use terms and constructs that could mean different things to us individually or among different groups.
In both the public service and political arena we loosely use terms such as fairness, equality and reforms, we equally here, in today’s global context have liberalism, democracy, globalisation and governance as some of the more used concepts/terms. The question I pose is do we as individuals and groups or even organizations always mean the same thing when we use any of these terms? Apart from the ambiguity inherent in each term, we often see two very strange results of the use of these terms. Firstly, these terms may mean opposite things to different individuals and groups or organizations and when such is the case our approaches to similar problems or challenges would necessarily differ as well. This is the easier and more common eventuality that we know of and take as a given in our decision making processes. It is also the one side that creates less of potential for simmering explosions of tensions based on different outlooks and inner built adherence to those sets of precepts that I alluded to earlier. In our normal public service and political party decision making processes, these types are a common feature and even when there are marked differences, the management of such is less strenuous for individuals and organizations with leadership responsibilities.
The second possibility is when the use and pragmatic application of these terms actually unites individuals or organizations who actually believe in contradictory and sometimes even irreconcilable ideals. I am going to argue that the limited success (in my opinion) of the various reform measures in our public service is in part because, even when we seemed to agree on the need for reforms as individual public officials, we as well held very different viewpoints as to what reforms should actually mean and entail. I am convinced that leadership groups at the top of the public service were never in unison about programmes such as Work Improvement Teams, performance measurement systems or even Balanced Score Card, at least in so far as detail and focus of these measures meant and impacted on decision making processes in the public service. This is so because when we use these terms , they are normally not used to mean coherent packages or systems of ideas, instead it is a given that we are always aware, even when we may claim otherwise, that we use these terms to describe and depict aggregations of quite heterogeneous meanings, principles and facts.
Some of the meanings, principles and facts associated with these terms are such because by some accident of history they have been attached to these terms, even when at different times the context and detail of meaning was actually different.
As individuals we then attach our own individualism to levels of reconciling our deep rooted meanings, especially where they may contradict the official meaning as was the case in the above.
This second perception is probably more common in the arena of political party negotiations for cooperation than it is within the public sector. The failed umbrella talks on opposition cooperation had brought together four (4) political parties who, while sharing a common objective and presumably driven by principle(s) of enhancing democratic practices in providing an alternative government, could at certain levels be argued to have contradictory ideals. This is where my choice of terms like liberalism comes to the fore and any decisions that was to further define the direction of the talks becomes inherently a principle based one, irrespective of whether those were stated or not. I am not going to make a judgement on whether there is necessarily contradictory and irreconcilable ideals within the different political parties involved in both the failed and the resumed talks, suffice to argue that, the very fact that total merger of opposition parties seem to be seen as not an obvious choice for all of them, at least in the short term, suggests that at the core are sets of precepts and principles that individuals within these parties and the collective of these individuals put upfront as their solace.
These are the very tenants of individualism, expressed not so much in the emphasis of individuals as stand-alone entities, but more in the context that our individualism and any decisions we make in that context are essentially socially constructed and are determined not by us as isolated or self-contained leaders but by us as leaders whose whole nature is determined by the collective image of the larger polity.
Molaodi teaches Public administration at the University of Botswana
