African countries' current high growth rates raise a host of governance issues, too.
One contemporary African policy dilemma is to facilitate greater understanding and cooperation across the public-private divide, without familiar problems such as firms 'capturing' (unduly influencing) their own regulators.
Given the pan-continental shortage of skilled management-level staff, one current under-played strategic issue is how to build (and retain) a competent cohort of public sector regulators and policymakers, when local and global firms (and, importantly, state-owned 'private' enteprises) expanding in Africa seek to hire people from the same shallow skills pool.
Related to competency questions are integrity ones when firms seek to hire public servants precisely because of their political / policymaking contacts and influence.
Yet there is nothing new, nor unique to developing countries, about such patterns of moving across to the private sector -- just visit Washington DC's massive defence procurement establishment. Moreover, with all the focus now on the private sector's role in meeting public ends, there are strong arguments for encouraging public servants to understand and experience the private sector better, and vice versa; indeed, in a late-2012 post I wrote to that effect on 'building trust' between government and business -- here. In various other posts I've argued for more flexibility about secondments and business support to developing regulators' capacity (see here, for example, in post-conflict weak governance settings).
Of course, such ideas come with a risk of regulatory capture or corruption. What can Africa learn from Asia in terms of the 'revolving door' -- maintaining integrity and performance when officials move seamlessly between 'private' roles and public office?
My work colleagues have published various insights on these issues -- in relation to India, for example, where conflict of interest arise given how readily ex-officials join semi-privatised or fully private conglomerates. But how -- even without the benefits of public-private movement of staff, or the inevitability of it -- are such issues to be policed in African settings? Western practices do not necessarily offer an example, and non-Western practices may reflect a genuinely different (less rigid) perception of distinct public and private business spheres. Moreover, a recent analysis by one of our firm's experts noted that curtailing the prospects of entering the private sector later in life would deter talented people from joining the public sector in the first place, and why shouldn't they be free to 'cash-in' on their skills if the private sector find these of value?
That analysis looked at the growing tendency towards measures such as insisting on 'cooling off' periods (before taking up a private sector job), or undertakings to refrain from direct lobbying of one's former government colleagues.
In African settings, a company would weigh the reputational risk it faces by hiring from its regulator or relevant ministry with the benefits such person would bring in understanding official positions and postures. From a public policy perspective, the fear is that fast-growing economies see their best and brightest officials poached to the private sector or parastatals, or a very blurred set of networks and lines of influence that, in the long term, obscure the chances of building a more competitive, transparent economy capable of sustaining higher growth and widening it to beyond just a few sectors like mining or oil-gas.
This dilemma (foster greater public-private dialogue, but gaurd against undue influence) will not be resolved easily, if at all.
Jo
Ps -- See here for one interesting read / guidelines on the dilemmas of what is proper in engaging in public-private dialogue. This relates to the wider issue rather than the revolving door dimension of it.
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