EDUCATION
Why Doesn ’ t Devolution Work So Well ? A Look at Primary Education
Frederick Golooba-Mutebi
Towards the end of the 1980s , when the donors decided that it was time to finally push African governments to implement critical reforms in the economic and political spheres , one of the issues on which they laid emphasis was administrative reform . The proposed reform consisted of pushing governments to decentralise power from the centre to local levels . Governments had long centralised power and decision-making , issuing orders and edicts to officials who had been delegated by central authorities to ensure that one thing or the other happened . Whatever needed to happen , according to the wisdom of bosses in the capital cities , could happen without consultation . The opinions of would-be beneficiaries or objects of such decisions were rarely or simply not sought . At the end of the day , their views did not count . Donors attributed poor service delivery in all spheres to these arrangements . They believed that , for things to improve , the ordinary citizen had to be brought into decision-making . How was this supposed to happen ? Three broad measures were proposed .
The first one was to democratise local authorities . Democratisation consisted simply of requiring local leaders to be elected directly by the people they were going to lead , and in whose name , they would exercise authority . Next , power to make decisions , responsibility for service delivery and overall wellbeing of the communities over which they presided , and the required financial resources would be handed over to them . With the power and the resources , there would be no reason why they would not make decisions and deliver services to popular expectations . The third measure was to require elected local leaders to refrain from making decisions without consulting their constituents and taking their wishes into account . This , it was assumed , would ensure that decisions reflected the aspirations of the people on whose behalf and for whose benefit they were being made .
As with many reforms , these particular ones were ‘ sold ’ as a package . Democratic decentralisation – as they called it – had worked in many places outside Africa . Experts were flown in from Asia and Latin America to design decentralisation programmes based on their experience acquired from wherever they had done similar work . Little regard was paid to local peculiarities . Context was not considered to be important at all . What mattered was to get the technical details right . The rest would follow . While some African governments were happy to embrace these changes without much ado , others resisted and had to be arm-twisted to comply . Within the donor community and pretty much within Western academia , there was unanimity that what was being proposed was what needed to happen to turn things around in Africa , where ordinary people , especially in rural areas , had long had to endure collapsed education , health and agricultural services for years , courtesy of bad politics and mismanagement . We are now almost 40 years down the road . Much stock taking has occurred . There are countries where these reforms led to a notable improvement in the lives of ordinary citizens . These , among them Ghana and Uganda , became the poster children of how to carry out decentralisation successfully , the ones that other countries struggling to get things right sought to learn from .
In the late 1990s , I sounded a note of caution about the enthusiasm for democratic decentralisation . I believed there was something unrealistic about reforms that sought to put a lot of power in the hands of local elites over whom the
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