I know my experience is trivial when compared to the pain citizens in some other countries face. Hernando De Soto's phenomenal work titled "Mystery of Capital" states procedures to formalize a legally obtained home in Peru consist of five stages!
The first one alone involves 207 steps. Procedures to formalize informal urban property in the Philippines consist of 168 steps and a period of 13 to 25 years. In Egypt the person who wants to acquire and legally register a plot on state-owned desert land must wend his way through at least 77 bureaucratic procedures at 31 public and private agencies. This can take anywhere between five and14 years.
So, you can imagine my excitement when I got invitation to speak at the African e-government forum, hosted by the Ministry of ICT under the auspices of Commonwealth Technology Organization (CTO) Forum on E-governance.
At the conference a number of speakers spoke glowingly of the great role ICT has to enable transformation of government operations and create access for the vast majority of people who are trying to get basic services.
Unfortunately, the CTO conference like 2007's Commonwealth Business Forum in Uganda, mentioned a lot of "frameworks," "objectives" and "foundations" for e-governance but limited contribution or discussion about existing efforts on ICT and the need for governments to change their perspectives and provide significant leadership in this area. Leadership to create the right environment that will ensure transparency and access and not the chorus on "e" in e-governance, as if by appending "e" the nature and character of government changes.
It does not change! And what we have seen is: these conferences are limited or have no action to take advantage of what ICT can do to ease the pain citizens go through each time we attempt to interact with our public enterprises. While we applaud the bold effort by some governments in the region to build infrastructure to link all government departments and extend telecommunications facilities to the remotest part of the country, there is a timid focus on making transactions easy and citizen friendly.
While there are visible efforts by the Ministry of ICT and several government departments to have on-line presence, i.e. publishing information online, we have seen limited movement to online interaction and transaction; not to mention attempt to use ICT to transform government operations.
The successful use of ICT to facilitate governance lies not in the size of the wide area network or the use of any fancy software solution but in the extent to which citizens find transacting business with government to be transparent, simple and friendly.
In fact, government, whether regular or of "e" variety, must revolve around the citizen. E-government should not just be about cost cutting or efficient government, but rather it should be directed to bettering the lives of ordinary people.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Francis Egubson
Quelle/Source: AllAfrica, 08.06.2009
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