Leaders’ accountability
By Zechariah Manyok Biar
March 27, 2011 — Those who read my article, “Good governance and its importance in the independent South Sudan” on January 5, 2011, remember that leaders’ accountability for their action to the people was one of the elements of good governance that I promised to write articles on. I have already written articles on security of citizens, respect for law or rule of law, and fair management of public expenditure. The remaining elements to write articles on include leaders’ accountability for their actions to the people, political transparency, and meaningful citizen participation. But these elements share the same idea of accountability. I will touch them all in this article.
Accountability mainly means the external scrutiny and counting. It has political, administrative, and financial components. According to Anders Hanberger, “Accountability for finances has to do with controlling how well the responsible individuals or departments have performed their obligations and functions.” I am not going to focus much on financial accountability in this article because my article on fair management of public spending has touched some ideas on the issue. I am going to focus on political and administrative accountability in this article.
In political accountability, citizens have a greater responsibility in making sure that “power, individuals or departments, have paid due attention to ethical standards such as fairness and equity.” Our problem today in South Sudan is that our citizens are not yet well informed about their democratic rights. But that is not an excuse for not holding leaders accountable.
Elected representatives are supposed to hold the executive administration accountable for policy implementation and citizens should play “the role of holding the elected representatives to account for the general direction of public policy,” as Hanberger puts it. That is the participatory administration in a democratic government.
Today in South Sudan, we think about the government as the executive only. The President, the Vice President, the Ministers, and the Governors are the only people we blame for what goes wrong in the country, which is justified to a larger extent. However, executive is a drop in the ocean. Legislators, civil servants, and the general public have a greater role to play in good governance. A weak parliament and a weak civil service mean a weak system of governance in which scapegoat becomes the order of daily affairs.
Having said the above, we should remember that the people-based accountability system would be easy said than done in our current system of decentralized governance. Hanberger defines decentralized governance as “forms of governance originating from the centre, which have been devised for local and regional levels, as well as governance that evolves from the discretion of local and regional government, and governance that develops in local networks and partnerships.”
Since I am part of the system now in South Sudan, I experience the difficulties of a decentralized system of governance. It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish what the state policy is at policy implementation level as well as on the prevention of community clashes. Legislators in the federal parliament in South Sudan avoid their responsibility by saying that the government of state will deal with a particular pressing issue even when the role of legislators in the process is clear. The state government, on the other hand, avoids the responsibility by saying that a system is controlled in Juba. This confuses citizens on who to hold accountable.
The current operation of South Sudan police is a good example. When there is a tribal conflict, a decentralized police take side instead of controlling the situation. That is a big problem.
The other problem is the lack of rapid response from the decentralized police. Recently in Wanglei Payam of Twic East County, Jonglei State, civilians fought for six hours on March 3, 2011 without any intervention from the police. The police Commissioner in Jonglei State was on his way to Juba when the gun-fighting started at about nine o’clock in the morning in Wanglei area. So he could not do anything. The central command of police could not send an urgent intervention force because of the decentralization policy. So who do you hold accountable here when you are a concerned citizen? Not clear.
I should remind my readers that I am not against decentralization. What I am saying is the difficulty of leaders’ accountability to their people in a decentralized system. It is challenging.
But a solution can be found, since we have a decentralized system of government in other countries. We can learn from those countries on how to improve on leaders’ accountability to their people. In those countries, citizens are active in sharing the responsibility with policy makers by providing them with needed information, and the policy makers respond and act on the information they receive from citizens without any excuse. But these kinds of responses can be possible only when the policies on decentralization are clear.
The giving of information is not free of challenges either. Information that our citizens give sometimes is mixed with rumors. The solution to this problem is that the Members of Parliament should visit their constituencies from time to time to find out growing problems at their early stages. They should encourage dialogues among different communities so that rumors that provoke tribal conflicts are reduced. I will write on the idea of dialogue later when I turn my attention on how to solve our current tribal conflicts in South Sudan.
Other possible solution is that the media should be supported as part of leaders’ accountability to general public. The media in every government is one of the important tools that force wise leaders examine their daily performances in the government, or even in the private sector. Only leaders who do not want to improve on their performances hate the media.
However, media personnel should be responsible in their criticisms of leaders. They must always be objective. They must always base their reports and criticisms on facts. Freedom of speech is good when it is constructive, but it is destructive when it is irresponsible.
All in all, the accountability of leaders in their action towards the people of South Sudan can only work, to borrow Hanberger’s phrase, if “public actors and institutions join networks and partnerships in order to resolve pressing problems and challenges” in our newest nation in the world. Scapegoat tactics practiced by some of our people must be discouraged in our country if we are to achieve the freedom and the happiness that we fought for over the last two decades.
Zechariah Manyok Biar, BA. Edu., MACM, MSSW. He can be reached at [email protected]