Author’s note: This is a delayed opinion drafted in 2024 when the Government of Liberia was in the planning stages of the national development agenda; published today, March 6th, for information purposes given that the Government is now facing a new economic reality given USAID global funding freeze.
Earlier this week on Wednesday, June 26, the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning announced that it had signed contracts with two Liberian firms, Subah-Belleh Associates and African Development Management Agency, ADMA, to “facilitate the formulation of the ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development (AAID), Public Sector Investment Plan (PSIP), and 15 County Development Agendas (CDAs)”. In the Wednesday, June 26th statement, the MFDP furthered “These institutions have been entrusted with the responsibilities of developing the ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development, the Public Investment Program, and the development agenda for the fifteen counties.” Though the Ministry did not disclose the money the Government is spending on these two firms, we can safely speculate that the cost is not small. Ordinarily, the cost of firms would be higher than what it would take to hire individual consultants in their personal capacities. I do not know why the Ministry, in its contemplation to prepare Liberia’s new national development plans and county development agendas, thought that the best strategy to do this job would be the hiring of firms, but not even individual consultants, if external, rather than Governmental expertise, is necessary. Individual consultants would have ultimately saved the Government the enormous cost of hiring firms, not one firm, but two firms, as the Ministry has done. [More on this later.]
There can be no argument as to the efficiency that consultants would bring to any public service task. But in a budget and resource constrained environment, as the one inherited by the current administration, one would imagine, that, as the Ministry of Finance itself admits, the management of the meager resources available to the Government [in the midst of the vast ocean of needs that have to be addressed] would be efficient and prudent.
A resource-constrained country and Government as ours cannot rely on the expensive expertise of consultants and consultancy firms to do our ordinary routine jobs. We must hire consultants to do what is not the ordinary, but extraordinary job of the Government; jobs that require expertise that cannot be found across the Government. Additionally, we can hire consultants when we are under-, not over-staffed as the public sector is currently.
In May this year, when the Ministry of Finance released the 100-day deliverables report, they mulled the idea of hiring consulting firms to draft the national development plan, when they addressed the Ministry of Information’s regular press briefing. Anthony Myers and Wellington Barchue of MFDP made that declaration. Since then, I began to have misgivings about our entire method or strategy of designing a national development plan. We make use of very huge amounts of money in this money-poor country, and we lavishly spend on luxury and comfort of those who are supposedly doing the nationwide consultations.
As expected, the MFDP colleagues did not deviate from the template, they mentioned a consultation process to draft the national plan and this, as they said then, will be led by consulting firms. They announced that the Ministry had set aside 700,000USD for the national planning process and the Government of Sweden had committed an additional 400,000 towards the design of this plan. In total, the Ministry had set aside 1.1million US Dollars just to design and draft a plan. In such a resource-constrained environment, 1.1million to draft a plan about issues we already know, is too whopping.
I then looked back at previous planning and consultation processes and imagined that this1.1 million dollars will be consumed on lodging, transportation, daily subsistence allowances and stipends for those who will be involved in the planning process. I reckoned that this template of nationwide consultations when we already know what the issues to address are is not really cost effective and efficient. Government employees and/or their consultants go around the country, claiming to consult with the local people. They ride expensive cars, sleep in expensive hotels, eat good meals and pay some transportation and food cost to the local people who themselves would have to commute sometimes on foot and motorbikes to the county capitals where these supposed consultations are held. At the end, the money is gone, the teams return to Monrovia, write what they think the people told them they want, and we have a national plan.
Sometimes, we add the county development agendas. But rarely are these documents followed or whether the people for whom these documents are drafted know or remember anything about them. After those poms and pageantries, everyone returns to their communities and life goes on as usual. Politics sets in and we just follow the default template. Do the regular budget things. Whether we act per the plans we draft is a question for another paper. This has been our national experience during previous years when we drafted national plans, the National Vision 2030, the Agenda for Transformation, the Poverty Reduction Strategies and the Pro Poor Agenda for Peace and Development.
The issues elaborated in all those plans are still relevant today as the time they were drafted. This means that anyone endeavoring to develop a new national plan as the Government, led by MFDP is attempting to do, has a rich resource to tap on to develop the national plan without having to cost the Government so much money as would require the expertise of consultancy firms to do.
I spoke with a friend when Barchue and Myers first announced the idea of hiring consulting firms and the nationwide consultation approach. Both methods, nationwide consultations and working with consulting firms, seemed to me a wastage of public money, when we already have these very rich resources and body of research and background information to tap on. The issues in the PAPD, the National Vision 2030 document and the Agenda for Transformation are still yet to be addressed. We do not need new consultations to learn what we need to do for the country to expand economic growth, advance the rule of law, strengthen our institutions, among others. But not holding consultation and writing from what we already know seems is a hardline, unpopular and un-political approach.
Governance is political. My friend and I then agreed that the people have to be seen and must participate in processes that affect their lives and the development of their communities. We agreed on a strategy to save the Government the cost of having to do nationwide consultations in the traditional sense without following the previous methods.
Let us try the new methods: we already have lawmakers who are capacitated and well resourced. They received monies for constituency visits, and to add more salt, the lawmakers set aside for themselves, about 100,000USD each for district development fund and the lawmakers do regular consultations with their people. President Boakai has, to date, constituted about 99% of the relevant county authorities who would be involved in leading the consultation process to draft the national plan in their respective counties, and the various county development agendas. We can work through these well-resourced lawmakers and the local county structures who themselves can lead their own processes, write their own plans and transmit same to the national government without having an elaborate team of well-paid and well-resourced Government people and consulting firms traversing the landscape of Liberia in the name of consultations to draft a national plan at so high a cost to the Government.
We can set up a secretariat at MFDP, using the existing internet and communication infrastructure they have. We can even expand it and make it even stronger and savvy. We can then set up strong communication infrastructure at the county level to facilitate the exchange of information between the counties and the central planning secretariat at MFDP. By these, we are even expanding development to the counties. The communication infrastructure will cost the Government a few thousand dollars, but not 1.1million as the MFDP default template would have us do. By this method, we will get rid of the high cost of transportation, lodging, feeding and other subsistence costs that would be incurred if we follow the textbook template of having officials commute to the counties in the name of consulting the people to draft a national plan. We must coordinate from Monrovia to the various counties and allow them to draft their own plans or send us their inputs to the national plan without having central Government officials expend the high cost of traversing Liberia in the name of consultations with local people to gather information that can be easily transmitted via internet in a cheap and cost-effective way. No expert knows best what the needs of the local people are, and we cannot hamstring the capacities of local people to lead their own processes by hiring supposedly expert firms to do for them what they can best do for themselves.
The next attack on the default method, then, is to totally do away with the hiring of even a consultancy firm, not to mention two consultancy firms to do this national planning work when we supposedly already have the expertise in-house, at the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning and across the Government. Before the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning came into being, we had the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs. It was their job then to lead the national development planning process. The Planning Ministry, having merged with the Ministry of Finance, transferred that expertise supposedly to the new Ministry of Finance and Development Planning. At the new Ministry of Finance and Development Planning, there is a Department of Budget and Development Planning headed by a Deputy Minister for Budget and Development Planning and two assistant ministers, heading two separate, but supposedly coordinate bureaus, the assistant minister for development planning and the assistant minister for budget. Under those assistant ministers are directors and assistant directors, analysts, economists and planners. All these people are paid by the Government to do the National Development Planning work. I wonder what work they will be doing when two consultancy firms hired by their Ministry, will draft the national development plan and the county development agendas.
Ordinarily, we would hire consultants when we are under-staffed or when we lack a specific expertise and when we have the money to pay for the external expertise that we lack. Three conditions must be met to hire an external expertise: we do not have the staff to do the work, we lack the specific expertise required and we have the money to pay for the external expertise and sometimes the required service is short-term.
I wonder whether by the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning’s strategy to hire consultancy firms, [not individual consultants] to do the work that we, as a country, are paying the staff of the Government at the Department of Budget and Development Planning to do, MFDP is admitting that those people at the Department of Budget and Development Planning are just staffed on the Government’s payroll, but do not do or do not know how to do the work of leading and drafting the national plan and the county development agendas? I do not know, why would the first strategy that the Ministry would contemplate when they think of drafting a national development plan would be to hire consulting firms. Why do we need whole two firms to do the work the country is already paying the whole department of budget and development planning to do? What work would they be doing when these consultants do their work to develop the national plans? If the answer is that the department or the ministry lacks the expertise to do the job, why not tap on existing Government resources and expertise across the Government to do the job and save the country the extra high cost to hire the expertise of two firms?
Across the Government, I doubt that the Ministry of Finance cannot find the expertise to lead consultations even remotely and draft the national plan to save the Government and the country the enormous bill of hiring two firms to do a job that is done routinely every five years. Even if, with the expertise that can be mobilized across the Government, there would be a need for a few external actors, we can hire individual consultants, not consultancy firms for the whopping sums to do a routine national development planning job for which we are paying the staff at the department of budget and development planning. If this department does not have all the expertise to develop the national plans, national and county agendas, various planning and research departments at the various Ministries and agencies can second their expertise for the duration of the national planning process at no extra cost to the Government. For motivational and the extra expertise that these Government employees would bring to bear, we can pay them a few additional hundred or even thousand dollars for the extra work that would supposedly be out of their default terms of reference at their regular jobs.
The strategy to hire two firms to draft the national development plan and the county development agendas is a waste of the money that the Government, through the Ministry of Finance and Development Planning complains every day that it does not have. The one that hires the expertise of another has the money to pay for that expertise aside personal contribution of expertise. All across the Government, there is so much need to be met with the 1.1million that the Ministry of Finance plans to waste on these firms and on this entire process when we can take advantage of the cost saving way to do the same very job: counties should do their processes individually, write their plans and send to the central team; we reduce the cost; the Ministry can enlist expertise across the Government’s planning and research departments to do the job at no additional cost, because these officials are already paid by the Government. By these cost saving measures, we can empower the local people to lead their own processes and by extension lead the national process and we tap on the untapped potential across the Government to accomplish the same task without the additional whopping cost the Government would be spending on retaining the services of two firms.
As a resource constrained Government and country, we must make the best use of what we have until, we get to where we want. Ditch the “political” consultancy firms and save us the money.
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