Zero tolerance for poor leadership

 

BY WORKU BELACHEW

Development is hard to come by without adherence to the creation of personnel, in the civil service, that exercises eminent leadership qualities in the course of discharging public responsibility. In most cases, however, and as government itself has reiterated in various occasions, the leadership across many sectors is seen confronted with solemn challenges sourcing form various origins.

Plunging in unethical practices that are well articulated for personal gains than working for a common good and ignoring the relationship with the society, which is on a contractual base, are where these challenges primarily originate and flow downward and across critically crippling both individuals and sectors from attaining their set goals. Other bugs which have a huge potential to force our development go under the weather are capacity limitation, lack of commitment, centralizing or decentralizing responsibilities unnecessarily — for fear of accountability for decisions made. During their periodic reports, most offices are heard of treating the latter as a challenge that could be easily conquered with a sporadic training or with a series of meetings. That is also the chief reason for many public offices to invest their invaluable time wrongly caring out meetings and training. Without exaggeration such pseudo efforts, have brought and also will bring nothing more than disorienting the leadership itself.

 

Where there is poor leadership, public resentment is likely to occur. Indeed, it harms the public psyche, and end up making everyone to lose confidence in what government is doing. All these happen due to unethical individuals' appointment in the leadership. Some officials, for instance, in a range of government hierarchy usually admit failures but the corrective measures they put is weak to bring a genuine solution. Thus, public demands remain unanswered. Telecom service interruption is a usual phenomenon, for example, that made customers everywhere to raise questions as to how long it keeps annoying them. However, pertinent bodies once in a blue moon, in quarterly..., reports communicate with the people. Same goes to power blackouts and potable water supply disruptions.

 

The issue under treatment also disrupts working environment and accounts for poor service delivery. In many public institutions, if not all, individuals from top to bottom hierarchy informally establish networks, but not to work their routines better, to attack one another ignoring the duties vested on them. In such cases, decision making and speedy service delivery would be tough because of ill famed acts of one group to shadow the works of the other. If example be needed, the “saboteurs” in the former Ethiopian Electric Power Corporation (EEPCo.) which Prime Minister Haile-Mariam once made them responsible for power blackouts can be typical examples in this regard.

 

Be this as it may, there are hopes that dismantle malpractices originating from poor leadership. The current move of the Parliament standing committees in rooting out such challenges is one manifestation of that. Likewise, the government has never back off from accepting limitations —be the form, capacity, attitude, commitment or other— seen in the leadership at all hierarchies. Hence, it is installing assorted kinds of instruments to winnow those that are upsetting the public intentionally or unintentionally. Similarly, encouraging results have been registered in many areas as far as reinforcing the leadership is concerned. However, compared to the magnitude of the problem, there is a long distance to travel to overcome the challenges.

 

In fact, the government and other stakeholders need to work hard to get the problems mentioned earlier solved. Meanwhile, doing periodic communication with the public can be a great means toward mitigating most of the challenges. This is to mean that at times when service interruptions are inescapable due to various reasons, providing adequate information is vital. Above all, the leadership appointment across every government hierarchy should be made with too much care. Individuals that misdirect the enforcement of policies, strategies and directions particularly at grassroots, since such problems rampant in this area, need not be tolerated. In addition, high level of commitment in its true sense is important criteria to appoint individuals. There will be no need to talk about such challenges anymore. Therefore, a drastic change is vital to serve the public and to sustain the ongoing development on its path.

Published on 4 Jan 2014 edition of The Ethiopian Herald