When President Ian Khama pioneered a system that would see ordinary people flocking to his office to register their complaints or appeals, many people read sincerity in the initiative but some of us voiced our skepticism fearing that the move was bound to institutionalize knee-jerk reactions.
Our concern then was that in an endeavor to out-perform, justify its relevance and cement its existence and ridicule existing structures and procedures for lodging public complaints, Khama’s office was most likely to dish out poorly thought out answers in order to speed up the resolution of queries and appease complainants. It should be noted that when President Khama pioneered the initiative, he was well aware of the already existing structures and arrangements for receiving and handling public complaints. Perhaps in his opinion, the existing structures were not as efficient as they needed to be hence his decision to come up with a parallel structure with an identical mandate. There are always consequences to any action hence the need for a well-thought out mechanism to handle complaints from members of the public. Complaints, whether authentic, frivolous or laughable will always account for a significant share of our daily activities.
However, a good number of complaints are so petty that they are best kept to ourselves. Equally, a considerable number of complaints require very small efforts to resolve them, yet thinking through such small matters before reacting impulsively is crucial to provide appropriate solutions to the problems. Frankly, few complaints require considerable critical thinking which involves taking time to examine them critically before taking action. As the Office of the President (OP) discloses that it is overwhelmed by public complaints and appeals, we immediately develop interest in knowing the nature of such complaints. We want to believe that the OP has a register where public complaints are recorded. This register should indicate the incidence, source and nature of public complaints and appeals lodged with the OP such that by now Khama’s office should have devised a suitable mechanism to prevent or reduce the occurrence of similar queries. Failure to do so may demonstrate that the manner in which complaints are resolved is to a larger extent based on emotions and subjectivity such that identical queries may bring out uneven or very divergent responses. Over and above, our greatest fear is that the OP is inundated by very silly queries that may require the intervention of an archetypal brainless idiot who cannot differentiate his left hand from the right one. By pioneering the wide open door initiative for lodging complaints or appeals with the OP, Khama’s office in actual fact opened the flood gates for people to rush to the President with ridiculous complaints.
It must be recalled that when this initiative was pioneered, it was clear that people have to lodge their queries directly with President Khama not the Office of the President. In other words, people were induced to create imaginary complaints to enable them access to His Excellency the President. This in some ways persuaded people to manufacture complaints even in circumstances where none existed. Do not be surprised to realize that spouses were turning to President Khama for intervention on matters related to the bedroom or people whizzing to his office to complain that they are being denied their conjugal rights or that the neighbors’ dog is naughty. It is our considered view that ever since President Khama pleaded with people to lodge complaints with him, public complaints especially stupid ones have multiplied precisely because people were induced to come out and complain directly to him. While the initiative may have been in good faith, OP’s failure to prevent the escalation of senseless complaints implies that the motive behind the project was to portray the President as a ‘me nice’ guardian. The OP had an opportunity to improve the capacity of and revamp existing structures and procedures for handling grievances from members of the public. Because of his hardened scheming ego, President Khama opted to become the center of all activity. In doing so, the president publicly showed naked contempt towards established protocol and arrangements for lodging public queries and declared them redundant.
It is pathetic that after undermining these structures and procedures Khama’s office now has the slightest indignity to remind people how things have to be done when they are the same people who defiled and assaulted established norms for lodging complaints. President Khama has fooled people into believing that he has ready-made solutions to their problems, which is why people submit business proposals for funding at the OP. On the basis of this observation and taking cognizant of the OP’s admission of failure, there is need for a wholesale review of how things are done at Khama’s office. The president must desist from being a busy body and respect established protocol in order to give official structures some space to operate freely.
If the OP sincerely holds the view that public complaints and or appeals are better handled under the watchful eye of the President, it must establish a legitimate structure that could acts as a special appeals commission that deals with public appeals on behalf of the President. This arrangement will promote transparency and consistency in responding to queries and restore the professional credibility of Khama’s office. The establishment of such a structure will ensure that only complaints that have exhausted laid down procedures are registered for consideration.
As things are now, people are better off without zooming to the president to report noisy neighbors. Experience is not what happens to a man, but what a man does with what happens to him, and as such we must appreciate that populist projects are often short lived and always tend to bring out unintended consequences. Whilst still on the OP, we are reminded about some aspects of the political revolt sweeping across the Arab world. Of particular concern are reports that the ousted leaders of Tunisia and Egypt had personal wealth estimated to be in the region of billions of US Dollars due to corruption and of course legitimate business transactions.
We appreciate that the local mood is that our former presidents have not dipped their fingers into public monies and spread it out in various bank accounts abroad. Fair enough, but how can we really be pretty sure about this? We don’t want to be giving generous retirement packages to people who are worth more than our overall economy. We are not insinuating any embezzlement on their part but just thinking aloud.
