This week I want to follow up some of my earlier pieces on ethical conduct, responsible administration, unethical conduct and issues around these aspects, with a brief discussion of what could be the type of a responsible administrator or responsible adminstration. My earlier articles would, in themselves, suggest that out there is a vision of a way of being a responsible and ethical administrator or at the very least a way of practicing responsible administration. What is clear is that the type of a responsible administrator must indeed be a juggler that can manage multitudes of ever competing roles, obligations, responsibilities and interests. This is a very daunting and challenging task that puts the conduct of public administrators to extreme levels of tests for rationalization of their actions for the greater good of the citizen.
In their daily operations, public servants find themselves caught in between, what we have refered to as their objective responsibility on the one hand and their subjective responsibility on the other. In muddling through these conflicting roles, public servants at times find it obligatory to act in ways that are sometimes at odds with the formal organizational hierarchy norms or what legally the laws hold them accountable for. The conflicts between objective and subjective responsibilities are ordinarily manifested in three main types of conflicting responsibility. The first is associated with issues and cases where there is conflict of authority within and among public institutions and office bearers, especially superiors. This occurs when the legal instruments and structural or institutional mandates leave a lot of grey areas in assigning roles, duties and mainly defining where the ultimate authority lies in deciding certain matters.
Our public services are riddled with a lot of these kinds and where coordination is not a part of institutional relations, this can be a sore area for public service ethical and responsible practices.There is paramouncy in ensuring that the exercise of authority is never left to too broad subjective judgements, especially among and between different institutions or superiors exercising different mandates within the public service, even if those mandates appear to be very close and complimentary to each other. Embedded in some of the conflicting roles of the public administrators are the extent to which the exercise and level of authority is clarified as objectively as is practical.
The second type of conflict is that of roles within various public service entities and among and between various levels of the structure, including the individual administrators. This is to say that, often there is a lot of lateral and vertical duplication of roles playing and this will necessarily be a source for duplication and ommission of application of effort across the sector performers. The role conflict may and is often exacerbated by a corresponding existence of conflict of authority. When public services are a common ground for these two types of conflicts equally visible at the same times, then public administrators’ conduct is for ever under very stressful conflicting calls. It could explain the inability of the weaker lot to find identity with the citizen and produce public servants who subjugate citizen rights and public interest to those of the organization and/or individual superiors, even if that is visibly unethical. It can as well produce public officers who, because they identify with the principal interest of the citizen, choose to defy organizational hierarchy and sometimes even legal expectations to fulfil the role of protector and guardian of the citizen interest. These two scenarios are all indicators of what choices public adminstrators have in their daily challenges of how and when to act ethically or unethically.
The third type is conflict of interest, which is one of the more known and common problems currently debated in public services. At a practical level one would argue that a high percentage of unethical conduct or practices in the public services can to some degree be attributable to the values and legalities governing the management of conflict of interest among public officials. Lets for now accept the assertion that public administrators’ ethical identity is a cummulative of patterned decisions made over the course of an administrators’ career and if this patterned behaviour starts from the environment of entrenched conflict of interest, it has always been very difficult to change the culture and practice of conflict of interest, particularly its management and containment. We by now know what could be the implications of uncontrolled conflict of interest from the various cases before our judicial courts.
In any public service, the existence of any or all of the three types above calls for introspection and deliberate policy initiation to limit the associated negative impacts on the calibre of public officials in the long term. It is the interaction of the deliberate decisions by public servants on whether they act to uphold their objective responsibility or the subjective responsibility that will ultimately determine the levels of ethical or unethical practices in the public services. It is desirious that this conflict be managed with the ultimate intention of ensuring that the citizen as the principal of both political and administrative officials becomes the focus and determiner of patterned behaviour in government practices. What one may call the visionary responsible administrator is the one that does a number of things. Firstly, public services must cultivate a coherent and shared tradition of systematic patterned behaviour to guide officials in their daily reflections of how to deal with these contending obligations and interests. Secondly, the public officials ought to be guided by moral rules and entrenched ethical analysis that allows them to be rationally accountable for their conduct in delivering to the citizen.
Thirdly, and more importantly for me, public officials ought to put into perspective the often down played nature of their identity, i.e. that of being both the citizen and an employee of the citizen. This is often the cause of conflict between understanding the public servant’s obligation to the citizen and that organization structured to serve the citizenry and within which he/she serves. These three aspects define and produces a type of public servant that can effectively manage the three conflicts for the ultimate good of the citizen and become an ethical and responsible public servant.
