Ambition sans delivery structure

 President Bidhya Devi Bhandari’s address to the joint session of the parliament has been criticized and even mocked. In particular, her use of the phrase ‘my government’ has come under scrutiny. By that logic, last Friday, Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli went to the parliament as a citizen and came out as a subject, someone tweeted—clearly a reference to the royal era. Jest and hair-splitting over constitutional niceties aside, the content of the speech calls for careful examination.

 

Policy and programs are a vision document for the entire year or even for multiple years. It not only outlines ambitions but also provides a clear basis for achieving them. The half-heartedness in preparing this document is visible from the get-go. One would assume that a serious government document would make efforts to avoid tenuous claims: ‘transitions of all kinds have ended,’ (point number 4) or ‘mobilization of human resources [to implement the federal set-up] has been completed’ (point number 7).

 

For all intents and purposes, the federal transition has just begun. Equally misleading is the claim about completing the mobilization of human resources for the federal set-up. Many provinces are still reporting up to 70 percent unfilled vacancies. There also are inherent contradictions in many parts. The document argues that there has been a 27 percent increase in capital formation in the country and subsequently highlights the government’s austerity measures and savings—which it intends to mobilize for building infrastructure. Yet it also commits to increasing social security allowances and pay and perks for civil servants. The benefits given to civil servants should be increased, no doubt—but it should be accompanied by a downsizing of the bureaucracy and the outsourcing of several services to the private sector—which will help balance the book while paying competitive salaries to the public sector workforce.

 

Transformative changes

The address by the President highlighted several projects as if they were symbols of substantive changes—such as the steamers operating in Nepali rivers, the airlifting of a pregnant woman from Mugu, the response to the tornado in Bara-Parsa, and the completion rates of several airports and national pride projects. But in the same speech, Bhandari also admitted that the goals of ‘bringing transformative changes to the public service and increasing capital expenditure’ were not achieved due to ‘a traditional work culture, legal complications and weak mechanisms of accountability’.

 

Yet the address failed to offer examples of how the government was addressing these issues. While the President’s speech did touch on the problems—the issues around structure and the culture of civil service and the associated mechanisms of good governance—it only made passing references to addressing it in Year Two of the government. She repeated a cliché by way of a solution: performance-based contracts (PbC). Administrative reform is much wider and more complex. But let’s say for argument’s sake that PbC was a panacea. Who would spearhead its implementation? And will political appointees come under its purview? Even if someone in the PMO completely understood the concept of PbC in its entirety as well as the procedures for operationalizing it (which I doubt), they don’t have the will to carry it out.

 

Bizarre plans

Two bizarre plans stood out: eradicating the ‘psyche of poverty’ and converting suitable sections of national highways into emergency runways. (Even aviation officials are baffled by this one or how it made it into this serious document; perhaps this is what qualifies as thinking outside the box these days.)

 

The US Federal Aviation Authority database suggests that on average a dozen small single-engine planes land on highways every year, but for bigger passenger planes the instances are fewer—with disastrous consequences even for developed countries with flat terrains and roads worthy of being called a highway. In 1971, a Pan International Airline flight’s (BAC-111) emergency landing in German Autobahn killed 22 passengers; and in 1977, a DC-9-31’s forced landing in the highways of southern Georgia in the US killed 72 people, including nine on the ground.

 

Quirks aside, Nepal’s ambitions for a double-digit growth, middle-income status and prosperity are within reach—provided that our officials spend a little more time overhauling the delivery and deliberation mechanism and the work culture in line with the federal principle.