Times Of Swaziland: GOOD GOVERNANCE AND GOOD GOVT

GOOD GOVERNANCE AND GOOD GOVT
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By Jan Sithole on 13/08/2017 09:58:00


Today I chose to write a bit more about good governance and as I do so, it would
be appropriate to cite the elements of good governance first which are: the Rule
of Law and Transparency.
Good governance requires that the rule of law should always involve legal
fairness and justice through fair legal frameworks that are enforced by
impartial regulatory bodies for the full acquisition of fairness and justice for
all citizens irrespective of colour, gender, social status, sexual preferences,
religion, age, race and political affiliation.
Transparency is yet another very important character and ingredient that is
imperative for good governance to prevail. This means there should be open and
corrupt-free systems in the government’s public and administration offices to
ensure effective and efficient service delivery to the citizens and the guests
of the country but transparency alone without accountability is very important.
While transparency is very important, it is accountability that ensures civil
service is productive and efficient at duty stations.
Usually it is the easiest thing to call civil service to account because most
job categories are measurable and quantifiable as such performance targets are
visible and measurable, even though the benchmarks will always be different and
sectoral according to different job categories, e.g. it is easy to measure as to
how many cans of coke can be produced per hour at a brewery, but you would need
a different benchmark to determine the productivity of the school and
productivity in a factory.
But this becomes even difficult in politics to measure productivity, because a
country may have many natural resources and still be poor, others may have fewer
natural resources and be very rich and progressive. Others may not have natural
resources but empower their human resources such that they produce a populace
that is dynamic, innovative and creative to an extent  that out of thin king
outside the box they become highly economic  and competitive. Some of these
countries without natural resources are countries like Japan and Singapore.
One country with a limited number of natural resources but use what they have
effectively is Botswana, some countries in the African region who have ensured
that they pump more money into human resource development have eventually been
able to import skilled labour and professionals abroad. These people are
employable wherever they go in the global village.
I am happy to say Swaziland did well in the past as we can showcase some of our
own people working abroad but unfortunately, in as far as the education standard
at the moment is concerned, we have undoubtedly dropped the ball. Unfortunately,
we have dropped the ball in industrialisation and mining over the years, while
mechanisation and technology has reduced labour intensiveness in industries
resulting in a loss of jobs.
Remember we used to produce  televisions, mine coal at Mpaka, mine asbestos at
Havelock mine, produced kraft pulp at Usuthu Pulp, produced paper at the Swazi
Paper Mills, mined diamonds at Dvokolwako, mined iron ore at Ngwenya and again
for different reasons, we dropped the ball.