Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro Permanent Secretary (PS), what kind of an animal is he or she? I have been wondering as a student of Public Administration, and as John Citizen trying to make sense of this hybrid. This is not an outlandish question. In fact, it has been plugged into my consciousness by what appears to be the dubious nature of this Office within the Namibian administrative system, or should one say political system? It is this very ambivalence, whether to refer to it in terms of its position within the administrative or political system that is at the root of the seeming amorphous nature of the institution of permanent secretariat. Are PSs political heads or administrative heads? Some would say they are the former, while others say they are the latter. I would say the latter. In fact, I would have thought that is why we have a minister and a deputy minister in any ministry. They are the essential political animals. Thus permanent secretaries cannot choose to emulate the political principals in their political being, nor can they choose to be one or the other or both. They are administrators, or supposed to be administrators, period. Granted of course that they are meant to be familiar with the policy of the government of the day. That is where they may claim to be political animals of some sort. Granted that they are also senior political advisors to their political principals. But being political advisors is not the same thing as being politicians. It is also important to distinguish between the private offices of the political principals and their political advisors who are political appointees and not career civil servants from career civil servants, a group that includes permanent secretaries. These advisors are, to use British civil service technical language, the ones on tap but not on top. However, the practice or tacit if not blatant tradition in Namibia seems for these creatures to be more political than administrative. You would find them gracing public platforms expounding on the policies of their ministries, which I believe is more the role of the ministers with theirs being ensuring the necessary administrative and logistic backup for the implementation of governmental or ministerial policies, and not least service delivery. As generalists, or supposed generalists, you often find them acting as experts of their ministries in what are essentially technical matters. This is forgetting that there are directors and what-have-you in these ministries, offices and agencies. The directors are the people who are supposed to be the experts and technically minded elements and when it comes to areas of expertise they are the ones who should be the authorities and not the permanent secretaries. This is not to say that Permanent Secretaries cannot and should not be familiar with the various disciplines encompassing their respective institutions. This is more the case given the complexity these days of public administration responsive to modern societies and their demands. Still there is no way that they can be experts in the various areas of expertise relevant to their ministries. I must admit that is my understanding of Permanent Secretaries who otherwise can be referred to as Chief Administrators of their institutions or in modern glamorous private sector jargon, the Chief Executive Officers or Managing Directors. Good and well if some, or all of them for that matter, happen to have expert knowledge relevant to their institutions. Most crucially they must have financial and management acumen with expert knowledge of the institutions they head, only an added advantage. By and large this is the area of the experts and technocrats within. The duty of permanent secretaries I believe is overall oversight of the eclectic constituents of their institutions which by no means require them to be endowed with the expertise of the various constituent elements of the ministry, save the basic informed knowledge to be able to make sense of the comings and goings in their institutions. In a nutshell accounting officers. Very often one finds these administrative heads out of office engaging in businesses that are essentially the expert domain of specialists. The recent observation by the Permanent Secretary of Finance is not only instructive but goes to the essence of the unofficial tradition of what permanent secretaries are all about. This is the administrator-cum-politician syndrome. In his concern about lack of financial discipline in ministries, Callie Schlettwein is essentially reminding his fellow PSs that they are not on top as they are supposed to be. It is not difficult to see why not. They would rather spend much of their time rubbing shoulders in political corridors for visibility, travelling, attending the one or the other workshop, conference, etc., than accounting for their departments. Deduced to the bare minimum he is saying that PSs are not where they should be, at their posts. How can they be when they seem to vie for visibility with their political principals? Perhaps my understanding of the essence of PSs within our system is twisted and my Public Administration background has become archaic and obsolete? Please don’t blame me should that be the case. It’s been years since I have been out of tune both practically and theoretically. Journalism, it seems, has gotten the worse of me relegating the little understanding I had of the discipline of public administration to the backseat. Perhaps in my second being I may rely more on my PA grounding and rounding. Meantime, PSs must make a choice what they want to be. Politicians or Administrators?