Commentary (by OJH Oswago) - Iron out all conflicts in mandate for PM’s office

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Published on March 14, 2008, 12:00 am

By OJH Oswago

Supervision, co-ordination and execution are management terms with specific dimensions. To understand them, one has first to comprehend management itself.

Henri Fayol, a French engineer, offered the first classical definition of management as to "forecast and plan, organise, command, co-ordinate and control". In law, supervisory jurisdiction has altogether different notions of rankings or a superior/subordinate dichotomy.

Implicit in legal notions of supervisory relationships is remoteness. Managerial supervision, however, implies intimacy and collegiality.

To supervise and co-ordinate, carries certain connotations and assumptions. It is hierarchical, assuming a superior/subordinate relationship. It presumes a productive enterprise with goals, objectives and vision.

It also implies importance of values needed to achieve the goals and suggests performance measures. This leads to capacity and authority to reward and punish based on good or insufficient delivery.

In management theory and practice, to supervise and co-ordinate, is both to lead (transformational or transactional), and manage resource utilisation. Depending on the level within the organisation, to supervise may include to hire and deploy or, at least, draw criteria for hiring and mobility between ranks.

A supervisor, then, must have real authority. He carries responsibility for unsatisfactory performance or failure. He must be a leader, capable of crafting a vision and, by inspiration and charisma, able to impel those supervised to adopt, internalise and project the vision. He must be shrewd judge of character and have capacity to exercise sanctions and rewards.

To co-ordinate implies allocation of scarce resources and determination of priorities. It includes ability not just to allocate what is available, but identify new resources. Co-ordination implies the presence of several functions or departments, perhaps singly autonomous, but all working together, in one large mosaic, to create measurable value.

A co-ordinator requires certain skills, including the capacity to understand the internal needs of the different divisions; and the ability to visualise how the relationships between different divisions will create superior value. A co-ordinator must also command respect.



What would it mean to supervise and co-ordinate in the civil service bureaucracy? Max Weber, a sociologist who pioneered the study of organisations, had a very neat conception of bureaucracies as the ultimate machines for efficiency, allocation of functions, meritocracy and so on.

In Weber’s world and time, supervision and co-ordination within bureaucracies would be relatively relaxed. Today, bureaucracy has been subverted into a rule-bound, inefficient, wasteful entity prone to corruption and influence-peddling.

What will the Prime Minister do?

To supervise and co-ordinate Government is a Herculean responsibility. It is not enough to designate an office, whatever the title, with a statutory responsibility of supervision and co-ordination. The enabling statute must define in greater detail, the substance of such functions and must amend, or, supercede a slew of existing, contrary or competing, legislation to create coherence. This must never be left to the surmise or the discretion of those supervised and co-ordinated.

This is necessary for the avoidance of doubt. The civil service bureaucracy is a veritable nest of conspiracy, self-interest, turf-wars, arcane regulations and procedures. These are most effective at thwarting change. Corruption networks are also thoroughly entrenched.

To these interests, legal ambiguities or lacunae are godsent. Add to this reactionary political interests and you have conditions for wasteful acrimony. In this regard, the draft bills on the PM’s office appear ill thought out and precipate.

The way forward is to foresee bottlenecks and respond by creative anticipatory legislation. For example, the job description for the President in the Constitution includes leadership, supervision and co-ordination: S4 (Head of State); S23 (Executive authority); S16 (2), (Executive selection); and S18 (allocation of duties). At S22 (3), permanent secretaries are mandated to supervise departments. The President then has vast, supervisory and co-ordination duties as do the permanent secretaries.

Where, then, does the PM fit in? We suggest that mere creation of the office of PM, with the tag of supervisor and co-ordinator, will not be sufficient. Without power of sanction, the office is a shell.

This is not idle pessimism. True, even without constitutional fortification, the PM’s office can exercise immense influence. The current US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, exercises phenomenal influence and Houpheout Boigny’s last PM, Mr Outtara, dispensed considerable authority, all without constitutional sanction. And so, Mr Raila Odinga can, given President Kibaki’s positive inclination, wield great power.This will depend on Kibaki’s benevolence, not constitutional authority, or, his statesmanship.

But, the Accord states the PM will co-ordinate and supervise the execution of government authority. Execution, in management, is what creates competitive advantage. It creates differentiation in effectiveness and efficiency in public management. And precisely, this execution authority for PM, has great potential to conflict with the President’s executive role, created in S23 of the constitution.

This must be resolved or harmonised. The provisions of new statute and constitution creating the PM, must affect, by amendment or deletion, existing provisions in the law allocating executive authority elsewhere.

The writer is a lawyer and management consultant