Promoting professionalism and eradicating incompetence in the civil service is foundational to development in Zimbabwe. Delays in service delivery have become a normalised operating standard in the country causing not only a financial burden costing billions of dollars lost to wastage every year but negative implications to public health. Be it at the Beitbridge Border Post, applications for official documents, hospital appointments, you name it, the common denominator – dissatisfaction often due to preventable delays.
Institutional incompetence is defined as a systemic failure within organisations where collective norms, bureaucratic structures, and a lack of accountability prevent routine operations from functioning effectively.
Public experience
Routine appointments are turned into a living nightmare where public servants flex their assumed authority on the vulnerable citizens attending offices for various services (application of collection of official documents and advice); waiting times are unduly long with no guarantee you will be served. Offices, including the Beitbridge Border Post, have turned into torture zones where service users are dehumanised, ignored and neglected. In that milieu, a culture of corruption festers – for a ‘better’ service, citizens are pushed into paying bribes for officials to provide ‘free’ service.
Causes of incompetence
What is apparent about service delivery in the public sector is the endemic lack of structure and organisation leading to inconsistencies in service delivery. The service is characterised by a bloated middle management causing avoidable bottlenecks and unaccountability; there is a lack of urgency by a demoralised workforce that is often under-equipped for the work expected of them, poorly renumerated, treated unfairly and many left feeling unrecognised by their employer. This is also a sector that has become highly partisan and heavily politicised where institutional incentives reward loyalty, conformity, and elite self-preservation over merit and competence.
Combating institutional incompetence
Combating institutional incompetence requires a systematic approach to target culture, accountability, and processes rather than scapegoating individuals. Poor performances within the Zimbabwe public service have a structural background of politicisation of organisations which force or allow people to make poor decisions with no repercussions if they are loyal to the political elite’s interests.
Adopting systemic transparency is essential to the removal of dark spots that harbour incompetence. Audits must be conducted to establish average processing duration for different service provision, e.g., how long does it take an employee to complete the initial process of a passport application, confirmation of an applicant’s identity, complete the documentation ready for collection? How long do non-emergency hospital consultations take? Juxtaposed with staffing levels, it is possible to extrapolate the average number of requests that can be processed per day.
Instead of the current random attendance to the offices, customers should be given formal appointments with specific times, clear instructions of what documents to bring to the appointment and estimations of time the appointment may take. Reminder text messages and/ or letters of appointment should be sent out to reduce non-attendance. Make contact to reschedule appointments easy so slots can be given to others.
On arrival at the appointment, pre-booked customers will need to confirm their arrival. This helps alert professionals of their presence or redirect the person in cases where they attended the wrong site for their appointment.
Ensure performance metrics is visible to everyone in the organisation. Building an air of transparency will require building safe spaces for employees to report mistakes by themselves or others. Avoid punitive interventions for mistakes to encourage reports of errors; instead, promote the eradication of a culture of cover-ups by rewarding employees for flagging mistakes early. To address failures, transparent reviews must be conducted to find out ‘what‘ went wrong, not ‘who’ did it.
Where everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Accountability needs to be streamlined so specific individuals are assigned roles for major decisions for specific operations within the organisation. It is equally important to ensure decision-making is decentralised to the frontline workers to avoid bureaucratic delays. Apart from a merit-based recruitment and promotion, there also needs to be a scheme of incentives for high performance to improve staff retention and overall performance within the public service.
Auditing performance is essential to an organisation. This analysis must not just be about how much time workers spend at work but how satisfactory outcomes are. Service user opinion will be important in measuring outcomes. Use of anonymised service user feedback is essential in understanding and informing the quality of service being provided. Identified failings and areas of improvement need to be addressed and repeat underperformance or negligence must result in consequences – redeployment or termination, regardless of seniority.
Conclusion
Combating institutional incompetence requires a revamp of our socio-political architecture so politics and the economy reflect the average person’s needs not the interests of the wealthy and political elite. There has been normalisation of incompetence and corruption that has seen leaders and public workers rising to their worst possible level of incompetence and incompetence becoming more rewarding.
MI 
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