Councilors need additional qualifications

WHEN Parliament endorsed the ministry of energy and minerals’ budget last week, elated legislators took turns to congratulate the minister and his deputy. An ostensibly insurmountable task had been accomplished and accolades seemed to be in order. The sword of Damocles was hanging over their heads by a single horse-hair but they managed to find their way out of the sticky situation just fine.

I have brethren respect and admiration for the two gentlemen but I will stop short of alluding to a spade as an oversized spoon. That would amount to lying to my person and I have no proclivity for doing so, even in extremis.

A fortnight or so ago the same ministry through Energy and Water Utilities Regulatory Authority (EWURA) issued a daring order to lower fuel prices, much to the chagrin of oil marketing firms, only for the decision to be promptly reversed.

The timing couldn’t have been more delicate.  It happened just two days after the budget got a nod and a wink from Parliament. Given the benefit of doubt, to outsiders looking in, it still leaves abundant room for speculation and allusions.

And for the first time in the history of the country, the budget was initially rejected in Parliament. It had to go through a purgatory state for purification before being admitted into heaven. That did not augur well from the beginning for the ministry. I guess sometimes one has to lose an eye to see things clearly.

We ought to thank the august House for being effective in its role of ensuring checks and balances. The sobriety demonstrated by a section of MPs in dealing with matters of national interest is heartening. I have not been around too long to know much from personal experience, but I know that the tide is shifting, and for some good reason too, and that people are weary of the status quo.

Yet the shift does not seem to reflect on the lives of ordinary people. We live in a society where water is a rare commodity instead of a basic service. We are still struggling to find the most undemanding solutions to problems that have since been relegated into oblivion in some parts of the world.

When the government decided to devolve power from the centre to regional authorities in 1972, the idea was to expedite development at grassroots level and ensure that better social services reach all.

Decentralization involved both developing field administrative structures on an area basis in which horizontal links between the field staff of different ministries are at least as important as the vertical lines of authority linking field staff of regional departments.

It also involved decentralizing authority over planning and implementing development programmes to local decision making bodies. But local authorities suffer their own handicap, one being low capacity of grassroots’ leaders on governance principles and lack of adequate mechanisms of information dissemination.

Strong local government is widely regarded as critical to administrative efficiency, citizen participation and regime legitimacy. Where legislators have proved effective in checking policy makers, councilors are yet to make a similar impression in checking those implementing the said policies.

 One fact is that the mainstream media has not shown the same interest in the proceedings of local councils’ sessions as they do with parliament proceedings. Councilors also do not get the same incentives as members of parliament do. One can safely state that their remunerations are not commensurate to their roles.

There is also a huge academic disparity between elected officials in the local setting and council employees. Councilors are therefore looked upon as happy-go-lucky with little understanding of the intricacies of governance.

Officials take advantage of that fact by hitting hard where it hurts most with such niceties like the use of unnecessary technical expressions such as ‘expenditure analysis’ and ‘commitment control’ when explaining the simplest of issues to councilors.

This makes it almost impossible for councilors to take to task public officials gone bad, and there are many one does not even need to take a closer peek. The result is a myriad of unwarranted expenditures on ghost projects while many real projects take too long to complete or do not take off at all. But true to our nature, money is always spent.

So much is spent on meetings to find solutions to a problem than on solving the problem itself. We need very active and knowledgeable individuals to take charge of the oversight role of our councils since we do not have a re‐call mechanism of the elected officials. It is not easy to remove them from offices before the expiry of five years of office tenure.

There is a need to raise the bar here. Councilors need more qualifications than is now required both academically and in terms of experience in matters governance to keep government officials on their toes at all times and maybe we could see some real changes.

Because without local councils that tick, even a heaven sent central government would fail in its pursuit of attaining development goals and our aspirations for a better future will remain just that, aspirations.