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Martin Stobart
If anyone comes to me and tells me that they do not know anything about development I won’t agree with them.
We do not need a degree or a diploma in order to be conversant with development. I learnt the basics of development from my 95 percent illiterate grandmother. The only book she could read was the Bible. She could not even write her own name let alone sign it.
Development, basically, starts with our attitude towards the work one has to do. It’s not as if development comes down from outer space, with a big bang to draw our attention. Development, be it social, religious, sport or whatever, has to be worked at conscientiously, diligently and dutifully.
Development begins with small things that are seemingly not important. For starters, one has to research for feasibility and then plan. Many people according to my experience think that the opposite is the case. We talk about a “good plan” while forgetting the “research” that has given birth to that plan. In many instances this is understandable; we do our research perfunctorily or matter-of-factly or informally and yet still come up with a workable plan.
If in our quest to develop our areas or institutions or business we start big we will have lost direction already. As mentioned above, development begins with the tit-bits, which we then combine aggregately to give us the sum total of our plan, which plan, again as we have indicated above, is a product of research. Simplified, development can be better explained as follows: a dollar, and we are referring here to the currency unit, is not complete nor does it have its denominated value if it is not the sum total of 100 cents. You cannot effect a purchase of an item priced at $1 if you tender less than a dollar, in other words less than 100 cents. And so it follows that development is predicated upon small development components.
Development has never started from the top, from the dizzy heights of the ivory towers. If you do and act like that you are actually doomed to fail because to all intents and purposes what you are saying is that a dollar is a currency unit on its own. You are saying it is not divisible into smaller units. There is an apt phrase that development which starts from the dizzy heights is equally the height of failure.
Nothing and I mean absolutely nothing, starts big. Creation itself teaches us a fundamental lesson, or a fundamental truth: “In the beginning God created heaven and earth…” And what followed were “components” to give value to these two initial creations.
With the right attitude, flair and orientation development comes to all of us almost naturally. It does not matter who you are or where you come from or what you get up to in your leisure time. As long as you are able to come up with innovative ideas you can develop. Actually what matters most is the quality of your idea/s. It is germane, also, and these are economics (business) and social development components. For convenience we can hyphenate or double-barrel them as socio-economic development.
We can sectorise development as well but the idea is to be as simple as it is practicable. The business sector develops economically while the State takes care of social development especially through its multiple and ubiquitous enterprises institutions and parastastals. In this context we are including local government. Whatever we like it or not, dear readers, this is where the big problems begin: who must or should develop that and where is the intersection between the State (the public sector) and the private (business) sector in the execution and application of development:
Is there any and mutual trust between the public sector and the private sector? By symbiosis we mean simply that the one sector cannot possibly do without the other. Is there any mutual trust between the two sectors, if we must pose the question once again if only for accentuation?
The issue of trust is fraught with problems for government more than is commonly acknowledged. The twin issues of mutual trust and symbiosis depend principally on who owns the means of production. In other words who owns and controls the economy. I do not need to delve further into the issue suffice to say that it boils down to who owns the economy and who owns the politics.
Many years ago there was a taunting statement which said that “the business sector managed the economy while the government administered the affairs of state”. There was an insinuation that since the blacks did not own the means of production they could not manage the economy.
They were mere political administrators at best; at worst they were just politicians. Effectively this meant, and to a large extent still means, that the nexus, if there was any, between the business sector, in particular the foreign-owned multinational conglomerates was tenuous and fragile as to make economic development nigh impossible.
In practice, therefore, there was a parallelity between business management and political administration and the parallelisation was by design stemming as it did from the racially segregated educational system of the colonial era.
As a formerly colonised people and having waged a war against political and economic subjugation, not to mention disenfranchisation and its attendant evils, we should have worked hard to improve our lot and prove that “. . . yes we can do!” we should have progressed instead of regressed as we have done.
Something went awry somewhere and no-one, it seems, had the presence of mind to ask where we headed to as a nation. Our local governments are the worst performing entities in the land. Our parastatals and state enterprises are grossly dysfunctional. Parastatals created vicious cycles as they failed to pay each other for services rendered.
This practice undermined their operations to varying degrees with the result that they crippled each other financially. The problem became visceral and insoluble. Government’s efforts to subsidise these entities had a terrible knock-on effect on the entire economy (including the private sector).
It is common cause as it is a common rule that parastatals and state enterprises, by virtue of their being national assets, rely entirely on each other for operationality (this is what is meant by symbiosis). And so if they fail to honour their financial obligations to each other they cripple each other financially.
This was clearly bad management by managers of these national strategic entities and the indicators were always there for all to see except those who did not want to see. It was at this point that the government should have read the “riot act” to the authorities instead of bailing them. This writer is a former employee of one of these parastatals.
The worst scenario of blatant mismanagement and maladministration is found in local authorities or local governments. Standards have been jettisoned overboard as a financial luxury as officers and in numerous other cases councillors, seek to line their pockets.
Connivance and collusion are rampant and overt in the local authorities. Town secretaries, town clerks and RDC CEOs consider themselves as political arms or party functionaries. It is common cause that some line ministers have given tacit condonation to this nefarious practice by local government officials, especially the local government Ministry. In the local authorities the situation is beyond retrieval.
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