The TGoNU must improve services delivery, good governance, and accountability
10 min readThe TGoNU must improve services delivery, good governance, rule of law and accountability in South Sudan
By Lino Lual Lual, Juba, South Sudan
May 11, 2016 (SSB) — Improved governance for effective services delivery requires an integrated, long-term strategy plan built upon the cooperation between governments and how confidence are citizens toward their government. It also important to having involves both public participation and the views of national institutions in the country. The rule of law, accountability and Transparency are technical and legal issues at some levels, but also interactive to produce government that is legitimate, effective, and widely supported by citizens, as well as a civil society that is strong, open, and capable of playing a positive role in politics and government.
This author considers goals for better governance to be identified as fellows hereafter, Legitimate, effective, responsive institutions and policies (embedded autonomy). Understandable processes and outcomes. Transparency. Incentives to sustain good governance. Vertical accountability. Horizontal accountability and leaders, and among segments of government. While the key challenges that must be addressed include, Avoiding excessive legislation and regulation. Giving politics its place in good governance. Building broad-based support for modification Paying close attention to spurs for leaders and citizens. Assessing public opinion. Strengthening checks and balances, both administrative and political. Recognizing opposition to reform. Thinking regionally and staying focused on the long term
Good governance involves far more than the power of the state or the strength of political will, because the rule of law, transparency, and accountability are not merely technical questions of administrative procedure or institutional design. They are outcomes of democratizing processes driven not only by committed leadership, but also by the participation of all concern, and contention among, groups and interests in society processes that are most effective when sustained and restrained by legitimate, effective institutions.
Never have these concerns been linked to more momentous opportunities. In the Fall of 2002 the 191, Member of States of the United Nations committed themselves to eight Millennium Development Goals, eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, achieving universal primary education, promoting gender equality and empowering women, reducing child mortality, improving maternal health, combating HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, ensuring environmental sustainability, and developing a global partnership for development.
As daunting as these goals are in technical and resource terms, they are no less challenging to Member States’ abilities to mobilize people and resources to make and implement difficult policy choices and to involve their citizens in initiatives that will shape their futures.
In this opinion, I suggest that good governance, the rule of law, transparency, and accountability will embody partnerships between state and society and among citizens to sustained not by good intentions alone but by lasting, converging spurs and strong institutions in South Sudan. There are interdependent as well: accountability requires transparency, both function best where laws are sound and widely supported, and the equitable enforcement of those laws raises major questions of accountability and transparency to cite just a few interconnections. Upholding these values requires a delicate but durable balance between self-interest and cooperation, citizens and officials must see good governance not only as an ideal, but also as improving their own lives where rule of law is strong, people uphold the law not out of fear but because they have a stake in its effectiveness.
Wrongdoers must have face charges of doing wrong not only legal consequences, but also social sanctions such as popular disapproval, and punishments from professional and trade associations. An approach that relies solely upon detection and punishment may work for a time, but will do little to integrate laws and policies with social values, or to create broader and deeper support for the system.
Transparency too rests on a partnership, officials must make information available, and there must be people and groups with reasons and opportunities to put information to use. Chief among those are an independent judiciary and a free, competitive, responsible press, but an active civil society is critical too. Government national unity could make it clear this time in period before reaching general election what has been achieve to South Sudanese citizens? How and where actions has taken place? Who is involved? And by what standards decisions are made. Then? It demonstrates that it has abided by those standards.
Transparency requires significant resources, may slow down administrative procedures, and may offer more advantages to the well-organized and influential interests than to others. It also has necessary limits: legitimate issues of security and the privacy rights of citizen’s form such boundaries. But without it, good governance has little meaning. Developing societies possess formidable social energy, and their undeniable problems create strong demands and grievances. How can we harness those services to build good governance while maintaining the balance between openness and effectiveness noted above?
The answer is fundamentally, have to do with democratization and justice. Years ago Rustow (1970) pointed out that the factors that sustain democracy literacy, affluence, multi-party politics, a middle class, and so forth are not necessarily the ones that created it. Democracy, he argued, emerges out of prolonged and inconclusive political struggle… [T]he protagonists must represent well-entrenched force and the issues must have profound meaning to them.
In those struggles days in South Sudan, Democracy was the original and primary aim; it was sought as a means to some other end or it came as a fortuitous byproduct of the struggle. Similarly, checks and balances, public accounting procedures, open but orderly markets, competitive politics, and administrative transparency are institutions and values essential to good governance, but citizens and officials both must have a stake in making them work.
Good governance is thus inseparable from questions of power and justice. Most of the emphasis in the aftermath of political and economic transitions has been upon participation in liberalized economies and politics. But institutions are essential to sustain and restrain orderly competition within and essential boundaries between politics, the economy and to enable developing societies to shape their own destinies in an increasingly interdependent world.
Many such institutions will have the task of checking the excesses of the powerful in the name of ordinary citizens: courts, for example, must enforce laws of fair play, such as honest appointments and basic business slide as well as enforcing contracts into wrong hands. That potential mismatch means that institutions must not only be well designed, but must also have solid support at all levels of society. State and society must be able to influence each other within limits, policies must respond to social realities and demands, just as participation must be subject to the rule of law. Legitimate paths of access between state and society are just as important as boundaries between them; where legitimate access is insufficient it will become an illicit commodity to be bought and sold.
Good governance is not just a matter of deciding to be good people, instead, officials and citizens must believe they will be better off under a restructured system of governance. Alterations have their costs, too: old partnerships and privileges, and self-serving public-private linkages, may be disrupted while taxes may be collected and regulations enforced more effectively.
In attempting to improve policy and implementation it is tempting to rely too much on laws and top-down policy-making. Controls on administrative, fiscal, and personnel systems can become so strict that managers cannot manage and elected officials cannot get their programs implemented.
Discretion can be reduced to such a minimum that cases with any unusual aspects take weeks and months to be resolved. The resulting inflexibility wastes resources and opportunities, produces policies that are unresponsive to social realities (thus eroding the credibility of good-governance efforts), and can increase incentives to corruption. There is a need for policies that increase the space for debate and consultation, encourage innovation, and pursue desired outcomes with positive inducements rather than through prohibitions alone. Procedural controls may generate massive amounts of information, but if it comes in forms that only other officials can understand, or if it is generated predominantly by citizens’ giving information to government rather than government opening up to citizens, transparency is not aided and people are unlikely to develop a personal stake in it.
There is no doubt that government of national unity requires lasting leadership and commitment from above, and that identifying champion is an important early stage in providing such leadership. But such initiatives cannot be effective if they are confined to blue-ribbon commissions that hand down proclamations, or to a one-man show. Even though it takes time, effort, and resources, and even though it will involve sharing the credit for improved governance, it is far better to get out into citizens, learn about popular concerns, and build a broad base of support.
As suggested in the above by the author, those issues can mobilize popular energies and commitment far more effectively than can good ideas alone. Without those sorts of connections, citizens will see few links between the rule of law, transparency, and accountability on the one hand, and the concrete problems of everyday life, and they will not develop a sense that change for the better requires their own support, participation, and compliance. Modification leaders who cannot demonstrate broad-based and deep social support will find it all the more difficult to sway officials and interest groups skeptical about, or openly opposed to, reform. Actively corrupt figures will take such a lack of support as evidence that the reform movement will be short-lived and often, they will be right.
Over time, high-profile efforts that do not succeed will lead to public cynicism, and will make the next round of reform even more challenging. Government of national unity will work hard often to emphasize public goods, such as efficiency, honesty, cultural empathy, and the like, to the exclusion of private benefits. Other kinds of appeals—that better governance would cut taxes, make it easier to find jobs in a revived economy, protect one’s family and property—receive too little attention, even when the goal is enlisting the participation and support of civil society. As a result, good-governance efforts encounter collective action problems: people decide that if reform improves governance for anyone it will do so for all, and thus that their own efforts are inconsequential or even unwanted.
Extensive efforts must be made to persuade citizens, government functionaries, and political leaders that they stand to benefit from reform—that is, to create the sort of sustaining stake in reform noted above. While a measure of coordination among segments of government is essential, it is only part of the picture. Government must also be able to check its own excesses. The judiciary is essential to interpreting and enforcing new laws and standards, and if it is not independent of the government of the day it will be ineffective. Similarly, executive agencies require oversight, and here legislative scrutiny and credible external “watchdogs” can enhance effective policy implementation and check abuses.
An ombudsman system to which citizens can make complaints and reports may also be valuable, but citizens must be confident that they will not face reprisals and that their reports will be taken seriously. (Even then, in some societies citizens will resist filing reports for cultural or historical reasons). These sorts of oversights and controls must be active, consistent, and sustained; if invoked only in emergencies or in the wake of failures they will be of little benefit.
Many governance problems result from a shortage of resources or a lack of state technical and political capacity. But others persist because someone benefits from them, a fact that reformers cannot ignore. Serious reforms may encounter increasing resistance within government, or from segments of the public, to the extent that they begin to gain “traction”; yet it will be at precisely those points that active support from top leadership and from civil society may be most important. Transparency and accountability problems are particularly likely to persist because of vested interests in government and society, and reformers must be aware that at times those resisting enhanced transparency and accountability will go through the motions—filing reports, producing data, carrying out reviews and assessments—in ways that actually conceal rather than revealing and attacking governance problems. Here too, outside monitors—auditors, legislative oversight bodies, investigating judges—will be essential.
Too often governance reform is a short-lived issue. This is particularly the case following a crisis or scandal; once matters settle down it is easy to conclude that all is well and governance problems have been fixed. Particularly with respect to the rule of law and its social foundations, governance reform will take a generation or more, not just a few months or years. Much the same is true of transparency and accountability too, in the sense that agency, political elite, and civil service “cultures” may need to be changed.
More rapid progress may be possible in those areas to the extent that individuals can be replaced and the incentive systems of institutions overhauled. Even then, however, bureaucrats will need periodic retraining, elected officials will need continuing information on governance problems (and continuing incentives to fix them), and citizen support will be required over the long term. Here too, public education will be an integral part of any effort to deepen the rule of law, and to improve transparency and accountability
The author is a master of strategic studies at Centre for Peace and Development Studies University of Juba, He can be reached via Linolual69@yahoo.com
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