A for accountability

Sandy Grant | Monday March 17, 2014 14:58

With the country reeling and the lives of many seriously affected by the power and water crisis, and in many cases, totally ruined it astonished me that BTV should have given first up news prominence to the formal handing over of blankets to the government by Sefalana.

I imagined then that others would be of a similar mind and that this lead story would be quickly pulled.  In the event, it wasn’t and the eight o’clock English version not only repeated the story but extended it with the addition of a little homily from Dr Jeff Ramsay about the unprecedented benevolence of today’s society. Surely a more appropriate person could have been found to carry out such a role?

But if I was puzzled by Wednesday’s TV newscast I was obliged to re-think when the presentation of blankets was again featured in  both the Thursday and Friday evening news although,  both times, only as part of a larger news story.

Is the presentation of blankets to the rural poor a significant part of the BDP’s agreed strategy which it believes will ensure it a further victory in the October election? 

The question shows no particular discernment on my part not least because I had previously thought that the President’s was a purely personal concern for the poor and also because I find it difficult to relate the situation in which the country now finds itself to the forthcoming elections. 

Self evidently, at least to me, this crisis situation together with the disasters at the BMC, with the collapsed Fengyue glass plant at Palapye, the still unfinished SSK terminal building, the north-south carrier and the catastrophic Morupule B project would be enough to ensure the almost automatic defeat of the ruling party in an election in democracies elsewhere. 

The reality here seems to be very different.

 It would be an over generalisation to suggest that past elections  have been determined without particular regard to the government’s  track record during the previous five years but  other factors have always tended to weigh more heavily. In this regard I suggest that the government is very much aware of its need to deflect the general public’s concerns about the causes of these failures.

I suggest that it is managing to do so with some success with its ‘no one is to blame’ strategy. For a recent example, take Minister Johnny Swartz’s statement that the termination of the contract with Sinohydro cannot be blamed on anyone (Telegraph March 12). Apologies to the minister for using him to make my point, not least because he did add the key qualification ‘at the moment’ – but others have made similar comments about the other major problems that now beset us where similarly no one is to blame. This, to me, is the root cause of the mess that we are in.

Without accountability, there can be no democracy. To insist that no one is culpable is implicitly to acknowledge that this country is no longer either willing or able to adhere to the democratic norms that prevail elsewhere.

 I suggest that one reason why this has happened is that the civil service, backed by the country’s political leadership, has been allowed to spend so much of its working time in workshops, self appraisal programmes and departmental meetings that only few are able to do the jobs for which they are being paid.

In addition, these meetings enable civil servants to evade taking the decisions which their jobs require of them. Bit by bit, the civil service, again with the tacit support and shared interest of the political leadership, has created a wall of bureaucratic requirements and routines behind which it has found comfort and security and been able to keep the general public it is supposed to serve, at a distance. 

Illustrative of this unhappy situation is a recent comment that one particular ministry is now  ‘impenetrable’.  Could this comment be made about other Ministries? The Telegraph’s headline (March 12), ‘Parliament loses control of DIS activities – research’, illustrates this same loss of accountability.

You, of course will have your own ideas about such matters. No one can be in doubt, however, that this country is no longer clean which together with a reduced commitment to accountability means that we have exposed ourselves to greedy opportunists and chancers of every hue who have eagerly exploited a country which has proved to be easy plucking. 

Perhaps, the present crisis will provide the shock needed so that the government and the country can embark on a comprehensive re-think so that it better understands where and why it lost its way.