Inept’ocracy
The Oxford Dictionary definition of ‘inept’ is ‘acting or done with no skill’. An ineptitude results is such behaviour being manifested An ‘Inept’ocracy’ has been defined in the Urban Dictionary as ‘a system of government, where the least capable to lead are elected, by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers’.
Alexander Pope, an English poet who lived in London from 1688 to 1744, was a brilliant wit, master of the rhyming heroic couplet, and the greatest English verse satirist. A neo-classicist and literary descendant of Dryden, whose heroic couplet he picked up and mastered.
Pope updated the satirical and didactic forms of and styles of the Roman poet Horace. He ridiculed the upper class of contemporary London in the mock epic, ‘the Rape of the Lock’, and his contemporary poets in ‘The Duncaid,’ defined the literary principles of the age on ‘An Essay on Criticism’ and argued for classical order in all things in ‘An Age of Man’.
Pope intervened in the ongoing political discourse of his time, in London’s popular coffee houses, influenced by developments in continental Europe, on the issues of governance by famously pronouncing:
‘For forms of government, let fools contend.
That which is best administered, is best’.
The ineptitude of politicians to run their countries in an effective manner, misleading voters by promises, that they would continue to deliver systems, forever and a day, by which nations can live well beyond the limits of the income which the nation earns from revenue, international trade and secured borrowings, by printing money, raising unsustainable bonds and resorting to all manner of idiotic devices to sustain the unsustainable myth of simply living an un-affordably extravagant life style, i.e. the excessively welfare-oriented state, has led to the evolution of a new word in the lexicon of governance – an Inept’ocracy.
In the context of Alexander Pope’s wisdom, even an Inept’ocracy, if properly administered, might deliver the goods!
Europe
Let’s examine that proposition. The experience of Europe, reflected by what is currently going on those economies, is that politicians, when the excreta hits the fan, mouth platitudes about austerity and then try to get voters to vote for austerity measures, and when the voters, unsurprisingly, show no inclination to vote for austerity for themselves and continued largesse and luxury for the ruling political class, the politicians head for the bunker, pronouncing meaningless platitudes on sacrifice and austerity, summoning some hapless bureaucrat like Mario Monti of Italy or Lucas Papademos of Greece, to take over and implement pragmatic austerity measures required by the state of the economy.
In Greece, they have held elections after the bureaucratic interlude but no party has got an overall majority! Back to the bureaucrats or back to the voters? The Greek president Papoulias has been trying to persuade Greece’s fractious political leaders to form a national unity government. He has failed and scheduled another election for 17 June.
In the meantime Greece has been handed over, this time, not to a bureaucrat but to a judge, Panagiotis Pikrammennos, Greece’s most senior judge will run the country up to the elections. In the negotiations with the president Greece’s politicians showed a disturbing lack of vision, shrugging off warnings that a run on Greek banks was imminent and swapping insults instead! In Spain a pitiful bail out for their banks, is being sold as a great achievement!
Sri Lanka
Ineptocratic governance was clearly reflected in the reasons for lack of Foreign Direct Investment in Sri Lanka, laid out in the 2011 Annual Report of the Ministry of Finance, Government of Sri Lanka, mandated by the Fiscal Responsibility Act.
According to the Finance Ministry, the factors constraining investment into Sri Lanka are: An inefficient approval process that requires potential investors having to seem approvals from multiple agencies, lack of focused investment priorities, price controls on certain commodities being resorted to instead of the alternative of using price formulae and regulatory supervision, inflexibility of ministries and agencies entrusted with promoting business investments, inadequate long term financial packages and institutional support for small and medium enterprises, bureaucratic attitude and compartmentalised behaviour of big Government agencies like the BOI, EDB, Tourism agencies, Foreign Employment Bureau, lack of professionalism and archaic procedures in investment promotion agencies.
These reasons for lack of foreign direct investment are nothing new. This is a classic case of Columbus rediscovering America! These reasons have been around and well-known for very long. The fact that the BOI was well past its ‘sell by date,’ a dinosaur which should be scrapped and a new lean and mean investment promotion body staffed by qualified professionals with a blend of youthful dynamism, seasoned experience, with a can-do attitude put into place has been articulated by those in the know for a long time.
The ineptitude is that nothing is done about it – the same platitudes and miserable excuses are trotted out at every opportunity. The EDB Board of Directors is reportedly at loggerheads with the Chairman, to whom accountability to his Board has no meaning.
Heads have rolled, in reality one head, but from many positions, in the tourism sector. New faces are in place, their experience in the leisure business has not been detailed, one is said to be the person in charge of the National Zoo, from where animal skulls went missing from the deep freezer! The height of ineptness!
Other players such as the Foreign Employment Bureau, the line ministries have long been known to be politicised, lethargic, incompetent and inefficient; the recitation of the list in the 2011 Annual Report of the Ministry of Finance is not stating anything new. The sad fact is that nothing is ever done about it. That is the Inept’ocracy.
A more alarming ineptitude on the exchange rate occurred when a senior CBSL official told an interviewer that the US Dollar would settle at around Sri Lankan Rs. 130 to 132. This was swiftly contradicted by the Governor of the CBSL, labelling it as a ‘miscommunication’! How inept can we get?
Readers would recall the comment, allegedly by British PM Benjamin Disraeli, on ‘lies, damn lies and statistics’; now we have ‘communications, damn miscommunications and statistics’!
The desperation with the inability to deal with the ineptness in Government is further reflected in one Senior Minister who complained of “officials who scared away investors”! The blogs in response to the report were entertaining – one said: “If so, do something about it – you are in a Government with a two-thirds majority!” Another Minister complained of “economic assassins sabotaging the economy”!
India
Look at India, in the three months to March 2011, the Indian economy grew by 9.2%. In 2012 in the same period the growth crashed to 5.3%. The agricultural and manufacturing sectors have been hit by slowdowns.
India’s growth is the first three months of this year was slower than what was witnessed after the collapse of Lehman Brothers in late 2008, when it decelerated to an annual rate of 5.8%. The country’s currency, recently hit an all time low of Rs. 56.50 against the US Dollar. This economic slowdown has been aggravated in India by political ineptitude; a paralysis has got the Government at the centre, unable to take decisive decisions, embroiled in electing a president.
A Congress-led coalition Government in New Delhi is hostage to State Governments controlled by parties other than the Congress Party. The Indian Union has federalised in a manner unimagined by the author of the Indian Constitution, Dr. Ambedkar. This is mainly due to factional politics of caste and community.
Regional satraps, whose political parties control the states, have the coalition Government of India firmly under their control. Mamata Bannerjee of West Bengal, Jeyalalitha of Tamil Nadu, Nitish Kumar of Bihar, Modi of Gujarat, Abdullah of Jammu and Kashmir, to name a few. Institutions of the Indian Union, like the all India Judiciary, the Indian Administrative Service, the Indian Police Service, the Indian Army, are the steel frame which is holding the Indian Union together. But even economists close to the Government are bemoaning the ineptitude.
Govinda Rao, a member of economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, has said that the latest economic data should be the final “wakeup call” for the Government. Eswar Prasad, a former IMF economist, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, USA, has said: “If these dire numbers of falling growth and the plunging currency don’t cause alarm bells to ring in the corridors of power and elicit a sharp policy , it’s hard to see what will.”
India’s Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee (and potential presidential candidate, it is rumoured), blamed the weak data on the poor performance of the manufacturing sector, which shrank 0.3% from a year earlier. He also promised to take “all necessary steps” to trim the country’s ballooning budget and current account deficits, which are a big drag on growth.
But the expectations from an inept Government are not high. Rajiv Kumar, Secretary General of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, said: “We may be in danger of slipping into a 1991-like crisis.” He noted that the ruling Congress Party may face social instability unless it moved rapidly to restore investor confidence.
But a wave of corruption scandals engulfing the Government and senior members of the Cabinet has left Parliament in a state of virtual paralysis compounding the weak ineptitude of a coalition Government; elections are not due until 2014.
Key reforms – including allowing foreign investment in the retail sector as well as passing a law to facilitate the acquisition of land to develop vital infrastructure projects – have been stalled in Parliament for more than a year.
The nationwide strike organised by opposition parties in protest at a 10% increase in petrol prices highlighted the challenge the Government faces when it comes to introducing sweeping economic reforms. Petroleum products are purchased on international markets at varying prices. How can national governments sell it at fixed prices unchanged forever to consumers?
The international market price fluctuates; the national market price has to also fluctuate, unless never ending subsidies are available. That is the simple logic. It is the height of ineptness, nay a betrayal of trust, for politicians to hold out anything else to consumers.
Analysts feel that the poor GDP figures would send shivers down the spines of senior coalition politicians, who will no doubt be heaping pressure on the Reserve Bank of India to react aggressively. However the combined factors of slowing growth, accelerating inflation and the rupee at a record low, will make it hard for the RBI to cut its benchmark interest rate of 8%.
The Indian Planning Commission recently was shown, in response to a Right to Information query, to be particularly inept by spending Rs. 35 lakhs on renovating two toilets in their 50-year-old Yojana Bhavan in Delhi. The Commission which caused a furore, by fixing the definition of the urban poor in India at an income of Rs. 28 per day, first defended the use of smart cards for access to the toilets saying it was to protect women staff, until it transpired they were men’s toilets!
The next response was these were open to the public including international visitors – but then why smart card access? Clearly even the world’s most populace democracy has certain salient features of an Inept’ocracy!
Nepal
Nepal, one of our south Asian neighbours, recently transitioning from an absolute monarchy, to a constitutional monarchy, to a new republican status from recent happenings, is a candidate for an Inept’ocratic state. A Constituent Assembly which was elected four years ago, to give the Nepali people, coming out of untold suffering imposed upon them by a Mao’ist rebellion, a democratic constitution, has just been dissolved.
The Assembly, which doubled as an interim legislature, could not agree on whether Nepal should be divided into federal states that would also have an ethnic identity. Two political parties refused to accept his and also rejected any compromise offered. They also refused to put the question to a vote in the Assembly, fearing they might be defeated. Earlier the Supreme Court had refused a further extension of the Assembly’s time, pointing out that its time had been extended on no less than four occasions!
By ineptitude of Himalayan proportions the authors of the 2007 interim constitution never imagined and therefore did not provide a solution for, a situation that would arise if the Constituent Assembly failed to draft and approve a new constitution, within the assigned time. They failed to factor in the classical ineptitude of south Asian politicians! The Supreme Court stepped into this lacuna and decided that if the Assembly expired through the afflux ion of time without completing its task, then fresh elections should be held.
Accordingly, the Maoist Prime Minster dissolved the Assembly when its time ran out. Critics point out that throughout the period of its existence, all the political parties did was to play a game of musical chairs around the prime ministers seat! The prospect of an election has panicked the political parties; nothing focuses the mind of south Asian politician more than the prospect of losing his seat! But, it seems Nepal is destined to join the list of Ineptocratic states!
Myanmar
Another south Asian neighbour, Myanmar, until recently, Burma, however, is showing some signs of emerging from an Ineptocratic state to a more democratic one. For decades a military dictatorship ruled Burma. The leader of the only opposition party of any strength, Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest after her party won an election by a landside which the military would not accept.
Wars were being fought with Burma’s ethnic minorities on the nation’s borders. While Western democracies imposed hard hitting sanctions on Burma, ASEAN nations engaged. China and India dealt with the military dictatorship, mainly out a greed for Burma’s natural resources. Coastal Burma was devastated by Cyclone Nargis which caused much death and destruction.
The military imposed a new constitution and made sure that the controlling numbers in the parliament were of military officers. Elections were held and the opposition boycotted them. A new military man, General Thien Sein, was installed as President. Sanctions were beginning to hit. ASEAN held out the bait of the revolving Chairmanship in 2014, if Burma democratises.
The new President held out his hand to Suu Kyi, who responded. Some political prisoners were released. By elections had to be held for some parliamentary seats, and Suu Kyi’s party, including herself, contested and won by a landslide. The opposition took their seats in Parliament.
President Obama announced that “an iron fist has been unclenched in Burma” and suspended sanctions. So did Europe. Suu Kyi travelled to Bangkok for the World Economic Forum (WEF). She had refused to go abroad earlier as she was not certain the military junta would let her back in to Burma.
Speaking at the Forum she called for legal reforms to entrench the rule of law to safeguard the political reforms. This was a higher priority to her, rather than laws to protect foreign investments. “Good laws already exist in Burma, but we do not have a clean and independent judicial system. Unless we have such a system it’s no use having the best laws in the world,” Suu Kyi said.
If Burma can keep its reforms on track, she may graduate from being an Inept’ocracy to a democratic state, but it will be slippery journey, with many pitfalls. Even Suu Kyi called for a “healthy scepticism” towards creeping reforms under the quasi civilian Government. Religious violence in Burma’s south, brings out the negative aspects of winding down a repressive system too fast, Suu Kyi spoke of ‘reckless optimism’ at the WEF. Freedom has resulted in new tensions between Buddhists and Muslims in Burma’s south, which should not be ineptly managed.
The diverse forms of government Alexander Pope refers to, from which to choose the best, he wants it left to fools, to contend, clearly cannot include an Inept’ocracy. Inept administrations have to clean up their activities, in the manner that Suu Kyi has called for a ‘clean judiciary’ in Burma, in order to deliver the fruits of economic and human development to their people. Whatever the form of government, inept governance cannot deliver.
(The writer is a lawyer, who has over 30 years experience as a CEO in both government and private sectors. He retired from the office of Secretary, Ministry of Finance and currently is the Managing Director of the Sri Lanka Business Development Centre.)
