Ebenezer Nii-Tackie Oblie Turflondon reacted to my comments about the misdiagnoses of the public wage bill problem by asking for clearer examples and a context for solution-searching. As IMANI has frequently argued, the real elephant in the room is not getting value for money from the public sector. Thats trite. The real challenge is even RECOGNISING that real value of the public sector in our Ghana context to begin with. The public services have some advantages that can be used to draw more people with high incomes to use those services so that they can cross-subsidise those with low incomes. Two quick examples might suffice for now. We have some fairly good public secondary schools. They can charge more and then provide scholarships to all the needy students who cant afford to pay. The critical thing here would be to design enough creative means of selecting those needy students so that their peers do not know they have been singled out for being needy, and therefore save them from the stigma. This would obviously have to be balanced against the need for transparency and accountability, which indeed it can be. It requires INNOVATION, which is hard but achievable! If politicians havent got a clue how to do that, then they should admit it and solicit advice from those who are bold and dedicated enough to develop the ideas and offer them. Perhaps, if they stop mud-slinging critics, practical ideas would flow like water from geyser springs. Second example: there are more advanced specialists in the public, tertiary, hospitals than virtually any private clinic can afford in Ghana today. With a bit of creativity we can deploy them to service all those above average income patients currently flying abroad for simple procedures if we disincentivise the tendency of these specialists to move into paper-pushing and kitchen-politics instead of clinical research and practice. Just look at the private universities. See how few of them are into science and technology. Why? They cant afford the laboratories and skilled manpower. Yet, we have expensive equipment slowly growing mould due to underinvestment in our various public university labs. You might want to call it the GBC problem. Go to GBC and scan the equipment they have and you will be surprised how the likes of Metro are able to give them a run for their money EVERYTIME! It is a mindset so entrenched that week-kneed and cynical politicians are simply not ready or even cut-out to solve. And insofar as citizens have been trained not to be critical and not to demand rigorous and creative results, these leaders we have been inflicted with will continue to get away with their complete disdain for real problem-solving. To quote Prof. Adei, we arent even ready to start contemplating what it would take to actually start solving the problems.
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 23:50:56 +0000
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