Modern Administration [Archives:2003/629/Community]

By Anwar A al-Saqqaf
for The Yemen Times
The political will of the government has to respond to changes and developments in administrative performance, could be considered the foundation in administrative operations, especially at both human labor and state's economy levels.
Restructuring these two levels with new modern mechanisms and administrative techniques would support the Yemeni government, while meanwhile provide good services for the Yemeni people. This includes managerial training, coordination and monitoring of those administrative operations.
There are two main factors that aid the development of administration services in the country. They are simplicity and decentralization. To achieve these two points, there must be rearrangement of organizational structure at all levels and in all departments in order to prevent illegal activities such as bribery, as well as abuse of the authority that results from disrespect of the law and irresponsible attitude towards work. To improve administrative systems and to maintain a certain level of transparency could be achieved only when a strong managerial will exists.
So the policies of simplifying management procedures, along with enforcing decentralization, are approaches to modernization of administration. And actually they are in essence preventive and precautionary as well as penalty policies at the same time, because here ethics take a major role in combination with enforcement of laws. Either aspect, ethics or law, would not be able alone to produce the best results. Therefore, it is important to establish good ethics along with good regulations based on specialization and professional analysis. A specialization that must indeed comply with the law, else it would further degrade the managerial aspects and in fact would be illegal in itself.
From this perception, the vision of simplification, decentralization, and combination of ethics with enforcement of the law in the light of specialized analysis, would greatly enhance the managerial processes and procedures in the country. And therefore improve the services provided to citizens.
However, many authorities do not bother with thinking of methods and ways to improve their management for this would clash with their personal interests. To combat this, studied and practical mechanisms must be introduced for realizing modernized administration under the law and all the legal, political, economic and administrative regulations, serving to accomplish a process that would fix or even eliminate completely bad managerial behaviors.
With all above explained, how is the current management, seemingly stable and satisfactory with the current situation? The answer is that this false stability is a result of independence of the decision making which means that a single person would be able to make whatever decisions and carry them throughout the department he is working for, regardless to righteous procedures, and with no respect to qualifications and abilities.
This in turn is a consequence of the wrong distribution and utilization of qualifications and abilities and practice of nepotism by senior officials. As a whole there is no balanced vision on employment in the government's establishments and its local bodies. And even if these bodies tried to establish certain management approaches and policies of strategic importance, there are many who don't even see the importance of good management. The citizen is becoming further remote from the state and the state's interests, and if no implementation of the modern administration strategies of simplicity and decentralization take place, it would lead to further deterioration. Specialized skills, professionalism, ethics and enforcement of the law are the gateway to success.
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