Welcome to the United Nations
This week, from 27 to 31 March 2023, the Committee of Experts of Public Administration (CEPA), a subsidiary body of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, meets. It has been confronted by the realisation that both the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine may have transformed the world as we known it since roughly the start of the century.
Both exposed a gulf between the narratives, perceptions and needs, with lived realities and facts which, though dimly aware, we can still not grasp the full magnitude. The surge of COVID-19 globally caught governments off-guard. Many reacted tardily and some indulged proactively in a blame game to escape the surging public criticism.
The COVID-19 pandemic crisis was severe and losses both in money and human lives were great, notably in Northern countries (more than a million deaths in the US alone). By contrast, in the South, including my own country, the damage, though significant, was less than what we feared. We are mercifully now in a recovery mode but still largely reliant on narratives and sources mostly, if not exclusively, from the Global North which, as one might expect, reflect a regional outlook and local needs, and therefore do not represent either universal truths or planetary imperatives - though they are frequently presented as such.
In the mid-twentieth century both governments and people, including in the Global South, looked to the United Nations for information, guidance, support, and inspiration. More recently, however, at the height of the pandemic, the global organization, specifically the World Health Organisation (WHO), came under strong attack, caught in a tug of war which left the South on the side lines. Simply put, the COVID-19 pandemic was weaponized as a golden opportunity to pursue Northern agendas. This attempt is still ongoing, reinforced by the war in Ukraine. In many ways, this simply demonstrates the extent to which our world, still to this day, remains Atlantic - centric and hardly at all receptive to concerns and needs in the South.
Need I remind ourselves of the long list of visitors who made it to the capitals of Sub-Saharan Africa but also the Sub-Continents asking their government leaders to take sides on a conflict in which they had no part. There can be little doubt that in the words of no less than the Indian Foreign Minister, still to this day “Europe’s problems are seen as the world’s but by contrast needs and problems of the South are only for the South to address and resolve”.
We have seen this contrast play out, in broad daylight, during the current crises. We have seen millions of refugees fleeing war-torn Ukraine but welcomed with open arms in European countries though seldom such a treatment has been extended to Africans, West Asians or even Latin Americans who desperately try to find a welcome shore and often drown in the process.
What the war but also the COVID-19 pandemic have amply demonstrated is the need for SELF RELIANCE. This is a need that we may have neglected overly reassured by the availability of global cooperation. This would disassociate the need for national governance, notably of the South, and national housekeeping from the imperative of building capacity and of developing custom tailored policies and strategies that are focused on the needs and take note of the potential of the countries of the South. Both long term and short term requirements need to be addressed.
What the Ukraine war brought into sharp relief is a picture of a world which is a lot more diffracted and diversified than we have ever imagined. Progressively a number of governments are waking up to the perils of overly relying on foreign policy outfits governmental or non-governmental - to meet diverse contingencies that change with speed. Not all of these contingencies are home-grown, but few are global in scope like, for instance, the COVID-19 pandemic which took us by surprise.
Relying on foreign “experts” and know-how from abroad carries enormous risks unless a Southern Government has homegrown expertise and dedicates personnel (manpower) to reach its own conclusions. Dependence has grown perilous not only because challenges and issues to be addressed seldom conform to standards that are worldwide in scope, but also because contrary to practices from roughly 1950 to roughly 1980, know-how is now provided mostly as a commodity for sale and at a price.
I shall not, for a moment, question either the integrity or professionalism of experts and consultants, who tour the world advising foreign governments. They work for private companies and non-profit organizations and are supported, for the majority, by Western sources. Seldom can they be impervious to pressures from their “bosses”, who need to show “results”, and they are also very often bound by limited experience or knowledge about the particular countries where they have mostly lived and worked. Few specialists can claim the breadth and versatility but also the professionalism, integrity, independence and vision of a noted scholar and expert. I refer to Jeffrey Sachs, who for several decades, served the United Nations in “sustainable development” and related issues. He, for one, has frankly admitted the pressures to which he was subject when, in the 1990’s, he was called upon to advise countries in Eastern Europe transitioning from socialism to free enterprise economies.
One conclusion seems inescapable: that foreign advice and know-how derived from either individual experts or “think tanks” - private or public - are seldom as dependable as they are often made out to be. The benefits they yield are certainly proportionate to the expertise and leadership available at home. We need to focus attention on building or rebuilding administrative capacity, know-how expertise and leadership, on the regional, sub-regional and national levels, in Africa, Latin America and arguably also Asia.
I used the word rebuilding because, under the aegis of neoliberalism and globalism many governments were pressured to listen to the gospel of privatisation and drastically cut staff complements at their command. It started with the US, UK and Australasia but soon spread like wildfire with polemics against “bloated bureaucracies” and the virtues of “enterprise”. Soon, lacking self-sufficiency, the governments were forced to go out to the markets even for staple needs. To give one example, drafting a legal document - a bill in other words - was often cause to call on well-known law firms, national or international, in order to do a job that should be done at home. Not only has this proven remarkably costly but also perilous in the extreme because it left the government - or country - with NO INSTITUTIONAL MEMORY - and dangerously exposed to the recurrent need to reach out for technical assistance in very basic matters of governance.
Though much can be outsourced of what a government does, on the national, subnational, and local levels, this cannot include planning, strategy, and vision. Sustainability, integrity and independence in governance are strongly predicated in building for each sector of government activity a mostly self-sufficient repository of expertise and institutional memory. That this could have recourse to foreign skills and know-how goes without saying. But it should be only an adjunct and not the main component of the skills required by the government to meet its staple needs and fend off likely pressures from interest groups, foreign or domestic.
On the morrow of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the light of facts that the war in Ukraine has brought to light, the countries of the South, but not the South alone, have come to question the legacies of globalism and neoliberalism. They have come to realise that they must revisit the structures, the policies, and practices of government departments in light of their experience and their capabilities. In this particular light they must upgrade their capabilities, safeguard their independence and prestige.
It has been said before but bears repeating that “a cheap public service can cost a country a lot”. In all too many countries, including some in the North, the public service profession has steadily been losing its former appeal. The causes for this trend have seldom been an issue of comparative earnings. To offer an opinion, I would really venture to say that the public service has suffered a loss of identity - loss of its professional core. The mantra of four decades has wanted public servants to become broadly “comparable” to their private counterparts. After decades of praising efficiency and effectiveness, making unfair comparisons between the public sector and private enterprises, we should hardly be surprised that the best and the brightest may not be coming forward to staff our public services, not only on a professional but also permanent basis. Apart from expertise in a particular field, the core of a professional, as far as we are concerned, is public service.
Decline of the concept of service matches that of lifelong service on a professional basis. We have come to accept that working for the government is like any other job. We have come to accept that all that matters is skills. We forget three other “E’s” that are no less important than economy, efficiency and effectiveness. These are Equity, Ethics and Equanimity: essential components of service, especially the service for those in need.
None of the above can either be transplanted or developed in a person in the space of a few months or even years. Rather, they are the outcome of a lifetime of service to the country and the government. “Hopping” from one job to the next may not be the best way of staffing the public service. Our countries in the South deserve and need life-long commitment and service and, to this end, a career structure. These paths are not the only ones, of course, but certainly the surest paths to rebuilding the public service we need. We need corps of advisers and corps of senior managers recruited and administered with a career in view. We need them for society in order to build government and public service as a career of choice. We need them for development as a sustainable drive for the good of all people, not only of a few minorities.
We need them to restore faith in the institutions of government which has waned in recent decades. And, last but not least, we need them to safeguard the dignity and independence of the countries of the South.
By Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, Chair of the UN Committee of Experts on Public Administration (CEPA) and Chancellor, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa