The Nature of Public Administration and the Potential for Conflict in South Sudan

By Tito Tong John, Nairobi, Kenya

Sunday, May 06, 2023 (PW) — The word administration derives from the Latin ministrare, “to serve.” Administrators are public servants who work for the people who have appointed them as their spokesmen and governors. Administrators have been delegated responsibility by people who depend on them to protect and perpetuate the people’s interests.

That groups of people are more effectively organised when particular individuals are delegated to promote the interests of a group is the idea behind representative democracy, in which the people’s delegates establish and implement laws and policies. In the modern occidental world, there are no “princes” in the sense of absolute monarchs whose decrees exhaustively determine the laws of the land.

Western leaders wield power ostensibly in the interests of those who have conferred upon these leaders the authority to manage their affairs in exchange for having agreed to make certain sacrifices of time and energy and for adopting a particular interest in the group’s well-being. People in official positions occupy multiple valuational worlds.

As private people, they are presumably subject to the same moral dictates as moral persons in general, but as government officials, they also have extra moral or nonmoral professional duties to act on behalf of their constituents. But in South Sudan, it is the opposite because the head of State appoints the public servant to serve his interest and keep him in power without hindrance.

If the interests at stake are not the same for moral persons as they are for one’s administrative group, then from the utilitarian perspective, this situation is inherently problematic. As an administrator, the person should prioritise the interests of those who lie within his domain of power and professional responsibility, but, as a human being, he should weigh the interests of the moral community in general.

Consider, for example, a case in which one has a large sum of money to distribute in the best possible way. Another example is our crude oil money which needs to be distributed accordingly but goes to a few individuals, six mean administrators in the Republic of South Sudan.

If one is utilitarian and calculates how much money should be distributed, the result will depend on the number of people whose interests are considered. If one’s community includes all of humanity, then as a private person, one might give all the money to those in the greatest need. If so, one might give none of it to citizens of South Sudan, who by any measure are better off economically than the people of most other counties.

As a public administrator of a specific state, however, one has a professional duty to prioritise the interests of one’s compatriots. In other words, the “best” action will differ dramatically in the two cases, leading to a serious conflict of duties. Let the square be the entire community of moral persons, where the area of vertical lines represents all members of the entire moral community, each of whose utility is morally relevant.

In other words, an official charged with maximising the interests of the members of a subset of the entire moral community will necessarily encounter conflicts in attempting to maximise the interests of “the greatest number” while simultaneously attempting to maximise the interests of those who have appointed him to give priority to their interests.

As a concrete example of such a conflict, one might observe here that even a fraction of the health docket budget in South Sudan might be used to effect substantial improvements in the quality of life of people in poverty-stricken States or to implement effective programs to limit the spread of AIDS or other diseases in South Sudan. South Sudan officials choose instead to continue to fortify the nation’s health establishment, although no significant rival to health might is anywhere in sight.

They make these allocations in the name of the citizens of South Sudan, not on behalf of humanity. Now, it is true that not all normative moral theories prescribe positive duties that officials would be required to violate in allocating resources to their constituents while concomitantly withholding resources from “outsiders.”

Nonetheless, it is still being determined whether even the most skeletal theory of absolute morality would be compatible with the requirement that an official prioritises the interests of one select group or society.

Suppose, for example, there was only one absolute moral principle, a negative duty not to harm fellow human beings. Situations might arise in which maximising the interests of one’s group or society could be accomplished only through harming outsiders, for example, through the waging of war or conflict, often regarded as a paradigmatic dirty hands case. One group or society may well benefit by killing some or even all of another group’s members.

Indeed, a leader may assume that he must go to war to maximise his constituents’ interests. Some have argued that the 2013 and 2016 Wars involved just this type of rationalisation: thousands of South Sudanese citizens were killed in a war intended by the South Sudan government to destabilise the Upper Nile and Equatoria regions for the benefit of one society’s citizens.

The international outcry “No blood for oil” by those opposed to President Salva Kiir’s 2013 war on Upper Nile and Equatorian expressed a similar concern. And the same sort of argument might be made regarding South Sudan policy vis-à-vis weapons imported, especially because the many civilian areas outside Juba were devastated by South Sudan leadership producing and importing weapons.

The trade-off for such administrators was between the interests of compatriots and those of non-compatriots, in this case, primarily South Sudanese. Consider also the case of military recruitment of Mathiang Anyoor or Doot ku Beny. Military administrators are undoubtedly aware that marketing schemes preferentially target people from lower socioeconomic strata.

Thus, in a sense, they are allowing poor people to put their lives at risk to protect the wealthier members of society from the Bahr El Ghazal region. From the recruiter’s perspective, what matters is to fill one’s quotas. But can military marketing practices be justified morally?

Examples such as these suggest that even the most attenuated version of morality may not save the administrator from potential conflict if he truly intends to give priority to his own group’s interests. The administrator’s unique situation strikingly gives rise to conflicts of duties with absolute morality, whether the true theory is teleological or deontological.

First, when one adopts the role of an administrator, the community relevant to one’s decision-making in one’s professional life differs from the community relevant to one’s decision-making as a moral agent.

Quasi-utilitarian calculations for the individual as an administrator and individual as a person will differ, producing duties conflicts. Flatly deny that the morally right action maximises the utility of the greatest number or indeed has anything whatsoever to do with consequences: some actions are morally forbidden, no matter the circumstances and regardless of their consequences.

This situation is problematic because the administration aims to maximise outcomes for those within the administrator’s domain of power and responsibility.

In conclusion, administrators would immediately encounter moral conflict when attempting to maximise the interests of those they govern because, according to such a deontological view, the right action does not involve maximising any group’s or society’s interests. Doing the right thing may or may not lead to good consequences.

Administrators, however, are expected to concern themselves with the consequences of actions and policies for their groups, and any administrator who fails to do so will not be fulfilling his agreement with those who selected or appointed him as their administrator, like the head of State or society.

The author, Tito Tong, holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the Catholic University of Eastern Africa, Nairobi, Kenya. He is pursuing a Master of Business Administration in Human Resources specialisation in the same academic institution. Previously he worked with different radios institution under Catholic Radio Network in South Sudan and is currently an opinion writer at Dawn News Paper frequently. He can be reached via his email: <tongkhamisa446@gmail.com>

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