The Public Sector Reforms Programme which President Peter Mutharika launched over two years ago continues being frustrated by what should have been an unlikely threat: the public officers themselves, who are supposed to implement the transformation.
Observers argue that the programme—which is now back in the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC)—risks achieving almost nothing if the rigorous mindset change that has been pushed for many times before is ignored.
Others still believe the programme is facing resistance because it did not go through Parliament so it is not fully backed by law.
Already, Chief Director of the Public Sector Reforms Unit, Seodi White, has decried that the “leadership mental siege” among public officers continue frustrating change efforts.
According to White, some public officers continue coming to work late, spend a larger part of their time in their offices doing nothing and fail to accomplish in time some very minute assignments like appending their signatures to documents.
White has also bemoaned failure to implement some very attractive policies that the country has formulated which have successfully helped other countries in their development endeavours.
“There is this mental siege among public officers, a kind of state capture where a system is holding itself; more like a collusion of non-performance. This leadership mental siege is at the public service level not politicians because politicians do not necessarily sign any contract.
“The technocrats that were supposed to trigger substantive change do not do their job. Sometimes there is even fear of accountability where some public officers refuse to be responsible for implementing something that falls directly under their authority,” White argued.
She said this in Lilongwe on Friday at the launch of the 2017 World Development Report by the World Bank Group where she was one of the three panellists.
The report centres on governance and the law and, according to World Bank Senior Country Economist, Richard Record, it is relevant to Malawi because the country is implementing the public sector reforms.
White further observed that Malawi is losing out on projects which would otherwise solve different problems because different officers fail to enforce performance to ensure the work is done efficiently and timely.
Recently, President Peter Mutharika hit at contractors and other public officers involved in road projects in the country for frustrating efforts to have durable roads.
And according to White, Malawi needs public officers who should get rid of “this mind-boggling inertia”.
“When a certain group of Malawians went to Rwanda, government officials there said they didn’t understand why Malawians too wanted to learn from them because they copied a lot from us including the Vision 20-20 and other policies,” she charged.
Another panellist, Blessings Chinsinga who is a professor of Political Science at Chancellor College, observed that good policies sometimes fail to work because there is excessive politicisation of the public sector where the culture of merit has been thrown away.
He argued that for a long time, some people have been appointed on non-merit bases such that Malawians should not wonder why the country is still stuck at the bottom of different development indices.
“It is also the case of whether the policy is going to directly benefit a certain political establishment. For instance, we have the land reforms and the Access to Information reforms which took decades to be implemented.
“Then we have some reforms like the [Farm Input Subsidy Programme] and the [Decent and Affordable Housing Subsidy Programme] which were implemented immediately. It is because of political interests,” said Chinsinga.
On his part, Governance Advisor at the National School of Government International, David Grocott, who was also a panellist, argued that Malawi, like several other developing countries, must continue pursuing methods of changing things for the better.
Grocott observed that the country has made some strides which need to be nurtured.
Meanwhile, White has expressed optimism that change is possible in the public sector.
She was responding to an observation from the audience that some public officers who are eager to trigger change in their respective stations are being attacked by politicians.
An example was given of Chiradzulu District Commissioner (DC), Memory Kaleso, who has been victimised by councillors for refusing to authorise that they should be given allowances for attending meetings not directly related to their operations.
Said White: “That DC is very brave. She stood up against powerful people and that is what we need. We need to stand up against that kind of political pressure. She is an example of emerging leadership in the country.”
In a separate interview yesterday, Executive Director of the Centre for the Development of People (Cedep), Gift Trapence, argued that the biggest problem with the reforms programme is that it is not backed by law.
“The resistance among some public officers could be because it was championed as a political party agenda and not a government agenda. It should have gone through Parliament so that it is totally legal,” said Trapence.
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