The splitting headache of poor implementation

Mbongeni Mguni | Monday December 5, 2022 13:09

Implementation challenges have dogged government for decades, costing the country billions of Pula in direct and opportunity costs, but more importantly denying citizens of services and forestalling their economic aspirations.

At its heart, poor implementation of government programmes, policies and projects not only means wasting the millions paid to consultants who draw up these plans, but also the potential benefit and opportunities to citizens such as access to electricity, water and other infrastructure, are equally lost in the wind.

That implementation has been a running crisis through the years can be seen by examining official documents, such as budget speeches, which lament the poor execution of various government policies, programmes and projects.

Speaking in his budget speech 29 years ago, then Finance Minister, Festus Mogae noted the nature of poor implementation and how this impacts national development.

“Deficiencies in project designs, delays in construction, cost-overruns, negligence in executing established policies and recently revealed weaknesses in the operation of some of our parastatals suggest that our implementation capacity can be significantly improved,” he said in 1993.

“This, in turn, suggests that government’s monitoring procedures with respect to the implementation of policies and projects, as well as the operation of parastatals, require review and refinement.

“We will endeavour during the coming year to improve on our early warning systems and our ability to identify implementation bottlenecks before they have a serious impact on national development”.

A variation of Mogae’s words have echoed in speeches from his successors at the Finance Ministry and other government offices over the years, as government has battled to bridge the gap between often brilliant plans and execution on the ground.

The variations have followed the pattern of describing the problem of implementation, how it manifests itself and then pledging to resolve the issue.

However, while implementation was a headache during his years as Finance Minister and later as president, Mogae’s era had more fiscal space to “accommodate” the bungling of policies, programmes and projects. The 1998 to 2008 period of Mogae’s presidency represented the golden age of the local economy, with consistent expansion even though growth rates were on average lower than the 1970s boom when they had come off a pre-Independence low base. The national poverty rate fell from 30.6% in 2002/03 to 19.3% in 2009/10, with most of the decrease occurring in rural areas.

That space is non-existent today, with budget revenues continuing a downward trend that began even before COVID-19, while fiscal buffers such as the Government Investment Account (GIA) remain weak pushing up the need for more debt.

While much of the debt has been raised from the local capital market, institutions such as the World Bank have also chipped in. The World Bank extended a $250 million budget support loan to Botswana last year and is due to consider a second $150 million facility next year.

The World Bank has first-hand experience with less than satisfactory implementation in Botswana. While the Bank has had little direct budget lending to Botswana since the minerals boom of the 1970s, its experience in the project funding it has extended has left an impression on the room to improve implementation.

In 2009, the World Bank, among other financiers, pumped $136 million into the development of Morupule B power station, one of the country’s single biggest public infrastructure investments, whose failures have been painfully chronicled by this publication and many others.

The World Bank is hailed as a global authority on implementation, attaching a rigorous review, assessment, monitoring and evaluation process on each of its projects and impressing the same upon its government and private sector partners.

In 2016, with Morupule B sputtering from frequent failures, the World Bank released a damning report that essentially found that the contractor chosen to build the power station, should have been disqualified from the get-go.

The World Bank Group’s new resident representative for Botswana, Liang Wang says his priority is how the organisation can be a more effective implementation partner to help Botswana achieve its hopes of achieving high-income economy status.

“We have done a few projects with Botswana and I should say the implementation record has been a bit mixed, and that is a lesson,” he told Mmegi in a recent wide-ranging interview.

“We want to be a better implementation partner and not just on World Bank projects, but to be more supportive of government’s own implementation as well.”

Wang stressed that while the World Bank is generally viewed as a financier, the organisation brings its global expertise in implementation from across its affiliates, other country experience and its own rigorous protocols around delivery.

“This means when we lend to a country, we don’t just give out money, but we bring global expertise on what can work, together with the ground-level experts in the country,” he said.

“We also bring implementation support and we bring our policy frameworks and rules for the projects to be implemented.

“Critics may say the Bank’s rules are cumbersome but this does bring certain rigour around Environmental, Social, and Governance principles, procurement and others.

“We bring usefulness to project implementation and hopefully some of these policies can be applied to the government’s own programmes.”

As a recognised challenge to national development, poor implementation is one of the biggest threats to the attainment of the Vision 2036 ambition of transitioning into a high-income economy. When the best-laid plans of expensively prepared National Development Plans, policies, programmes and strategies do not result in meaningful change on the ground, the country’s development aspirations are deferred.

For the past four years, Wang was in East Asia and as part of his work, studied how countries such as Malaysia and South Korea transitioned their economies.

“Translating that Vision into plans and making sure these plans are actually implemented, is where the success comes from.

“Once the plans are unveiled, it takes hard work for them to be implemented.

“There’s no magic about it. Everyone needs to work on it. The whole country has to work on it,” he said.

While tackling implementation has been a mantra over the decades, a document released this week provides a sobering and unusually frank assessment of the mounting urgency being felt around this challenge.

The draft Transitional National Development Plan, which will cover the next two financial years, has dedicated an entire section to implementation and contains some refreshingly insightful admissions from the planning and fiscal authorities.

“Significant government resources have been allocated each year to development projects covering economic infrastructure, social development and human capital development, with the aim of creating prosperity for all citizens,” reads the transitional NDP which is due to be debated in Parliament.

“However, poor project implementation and delivery have undermined these good intentions.

“Furthermore, poor implementation also applies to programmes and policies, which do not generally have high spending needs, indicating that the problems relate more to institutions and processes rather than funding.”

The transitional NDP says the challenges around implementation include poor scoping, weak monitoring, capacity constraints and inaccurate costing of projects, ineffective appraisal of projects, weak monitoring and evaluation, lack of coordination and fragmentation amongst authorities. Quite critically, the minds behind the transitional NDP say the absence of accountability for implementation at the level of ministries, departments and agencies, is a challenge.

Like previous NDPs which proposed a host of reforms and vowed to tighten the screws on implementation, the transitional NDP also contains proposed changes that government hopes will resolve the long-running challenge.

The most significant proposals involve introducing the “Development Manager approach” to project delivery where major public projects are packaged and their implementation outsourced to private companies.

“The turnkey system will be employed for smaller projects, where a contractor is appointed to handle the entirety of design, management, and construction and is paid on handover to government,” the transitional NDP states.

In addition, the NDP technocrats are proposing that the monitoring and evaluation of public programmes, policies and projects be beefed up with a law.

“There needs to be a stronger commitment to using evaluations as a tool for learning and improving policymaking.

“As an example, a rigorous ex-post evaluation of the response to COVID-19 could be undertaken – as is being done in some other countries – to determine lessons learned that can inform future responses to unexpected events.

“Such an evaluation could address issues such as whether the institutional structure adopted was appropriate; was decision making effective and efficient; were adequate resources availed and were those resources used effectively; was the best use made of the information available at the time; and, with hindsight, what could and should have been done differently?”

While the minds behind the transitional NDP agree with the World Bank that tackling implementation will require a cross-sectoral effort, one agency has been given the task of leading the fight.

The National Planning Commission (NPC) was established earlier this year with functions from the then National Strategy Office, the Government Implementation Coordination Office, the Vision 2036 Coordinating Agency and the Planning function from the then Ministry of Finance and Economic Development.

Its mandate includes providing leadership in national strategy development, coordinated sectoral and national planning, implementation coordination and performance monitoring and evaluation.

The NPC, as the main oversight body for implementation, will produce an annual performance report to indicate progress of the transitional NDP.

As inspiring as the new initiatives for implementation are, cynics will point to similar efforts and misplaced optimism from across the decades. The transitional NDP’s own commentary on the state of pre-COVID implementation is concerning.

“Generally, all sectors were impacted by issues of poor performance in execution and follow-through on implementation of projects.

“This should be recognised as an endemic, multi-dimensional problem that has been recognised and attributed to the denial of services and opportunities for Botswana,” the draft report reads.

The NPC will hoping to prove the cynics wrong over the next two financial years.