By Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
THE Minister of Health and Social Services, Honourable Richard Kamwi, last week promised the nation the riot act for his senior officials. The ink Honourable Kamwi’s promise was written in had hardly dried when Prime Minister Nahas Angula gave the Minister’s avowed riot act a real push. Less than a dozen of those hybrid animals of the Namibian civil service, the Permanent Secretaries, were made to trade their fixed abodes with one another.
“As a first step in the drive towards ensuring on-going quantitative and qualitative improvement in the performance of every ministry,” the PM rationalised what seems like the proverbial moving of the cupboards in the top echelons of the governmental house.
Among those compelled to take leave of their permanent homes of more than ten years is Dr Kalumbi Shangula, until then the chief administrator of the Ministry of Health and Social Services, the institution that has recently enjoyed some negative media limelight. He is now re-housed mid-City in the Post Street Arcade in the FGI Building at the Ministry of Environment and Tourism.
A new-but-not-so-new Permanent Secretary may just have come at the right time for Honourable Kamwi’s riot act reading. Granted that he may have read the riot act many a time, nevertheless on the face of it such reading seems to have been to no avail with complaints about poor service delivery in the heath sector mounting year after year.
Joining the chorus of the complainants lately is none other than His Excellency Hifikepunye Pohamba, the Head of State. Thus, it is only a blessing that this time around, the Minister may have read the riot act in the presence of new head-ears via a new PS.
Certainly, there is no way the rest of the PSs crew could not have been watching the goings at Health without concern. In the age of scientific management, or administration if you wish, we no longer live on hope like in the Stone Age. These houses need a drastic injection of new blood. But is new-old blood the same as new blood?
New blood is not used in its literal meaning but in the sense of a realisation that those at the helm of these houses cannot continue to run them the way they have been, as own personal homely possessions. This is the reason why some of them have been moved to other houses.
It remains to be seen that such a realisation, which seems to have dawned on the political principals, is also home to the subjects of the reshuffle. Not only, but it also remains to be seen that re-housing them compensates for the lack of leadership and administrative finesse they have exhibited. More so given that for some the new homes seem more demanding than previous ones.
The reading of the riot act by Honourable Kamwi is good intentioned, and for numerous of his Cabinet colleagues it is by no means the first. Many a time they have read it but the more they trumpet it, the more things seem to remain the same, if not retrogressing.
We are past the yearly half way mark by more than a month now. On many occasions at the beginning of this year the President may not have read the riot act but there was no mistaking his message. Somehow, civil servants need to deliver and fulfill the expectations of the ratepayers.
The re-ordering of the administrative cupboards seems a done deal that few of us can do anything about. However, I would attempt a word of humble advice. The incoming PSs must not act like new brooms that sweep clean.
In fact, it is time that the whip starts to crack not only for the unrepentant civil servants, but for the top dogs if need be as the PM well lays it down in his reshuffling statement.
One appreciates the President’s public concern but His Excellency needs to be more than just publicly concerned. In fact, it is within his power and wherewithal to demand an explanation from any Ministry, Office, and Agency about anything he may be concerned about. Such an explanation is not necessarily for the sacking of anyone.
Yes, if that is the right course of action. However, the idea is to constantly monitor the performance of any institution and for the Cabinet to collectively rectify whatever situation may need rectification.
To the rest of the crew, the finger may lately have been pointing to the Ministry of Health but the principle of collective responsibility makes every member of the Cabinet equally responsible and accountable for the shortcomings of any of its members.
The question is: What have the rest of the crew been doing in the face of such rampant reports of things not being well in the Ministry of Health and Social Services? I don’t want to think all of them are too rotten to bother about the evident rot of the whole.