1.
Paradigm of Governance
There is need to draw attention on certain false assumptions
associated with the role, responsibilities and accountability of a government
in any country. Most republics whether democratic or socialist/Communist have a
written constitution approved by their supreme assembly /parliament and acts as
a guiding principle. In their enthusiasm to serve the nation, or, perhaps to
harness votes, political parties pledge far more in their manifesto than they
can deliver. They are well aware of this and yet are willing to gamble in the elections.
Consequently, non fulfillment of the promises both the opposition parties and
public bodies often resort to legal option to seek redress to their grievances.
The perceptional flaw is on both sides; the party in power tends to think as if
they own the nation and are responsible for everything happening in the country. Likewise, people also wrongly assume that
government in power is accountable for everything happening in the country.
Both are wrong. Government is elected to perform certain basic functions as
stated in the constitution. However, it must be borne in mind that the
government only acts as a catalyst in most activities performed by individuals
and organizations in the country and are only accountable to specific
activities performed by the government
2
Myths about Good Governance
It is a misnomer to think that that any socio economic
political systems, unlike mechanical or electronic that can be 100 per cent
regulated (not to talk of controlled).This is simply because they are
behavioral systems neither fully observable nor controllable, and so, are too
complex in nature to be predicted. It would therefore be wrong on the part of
political party in power and people in general to assume that their
expectations would be fulfilled in total.
3. Science
of Complexity
Management
Cybernetic, utilizing the invariant laws of change, namely, the Law of
Requisite Variety and the Law of Recursion, manages complexity in systems. A
system is said to be complex when: (a)
it has a large number of elements that together identify the system are inter
connected in multiple ways,(b) Consists of multi level hierarchies, and,(c) Has
very large variety, where variety is the measure of complexity(possible number
of different states the system can take).
4. Conceptual Design Model
A conceptual design model provides visual map of the
internal structure of a system where representative elements of the system are
causally inter related such that the
influence of input variables can be observed in the output variables of the
system. The multi level hierarchies that are vertically inter connected through
elements, help in attenuating or proliferating the variety of information
between hierarchies, just the same way as a simple system increases or
decreases its variety vis-à-vis its environment. Construction of such a design
model greatly helps the policy maker/regulator to get a clear perception of the
complex system, such as a nation.
Good governance is thus only achievable when
the above stated pre requisites have been met with. Effective governance
requires that not only policy goals have been explicitly stated along with
specific policy instruments identified but decision rules (that give numbers to
parameters and range decision bandwidth. Also when the impacts on the system
have not only be measured and fed back to the regulatory sub system for it to
respond by making necessary policy changes. This feed- back mechanism would
have some lag time but should be kept as close to the real time, since longer time
lags imply changes in the state of the system and so the regulation would be
less effective if not ineffective.
