President Leonel Fernandez, First Lady Margarita Cedeno and Vice-President Rafael Alburquerque were in the front row to attend the lecture of David Osborne titled “Reinventing Government” that took place last night at the Barcelo Gran Hotel Lina. While the event was open to the general public, the hotel’s Salon de la Mancha was packed with government officers. The Global Foundation for Democracy and Development, the think-tank research center founded by President Leonel Fernandez, sponsored the conference.
Osborne’s discourse was given at a time when the Fernandez government is being criticized for maintaining most of the bureaucratic wastefulness inherited from its predecessor and has also pushed for new taxes to pay for it.
Osborne and Peter Hutchinson of the Public Strategies Group, as the authors of the best-selling “The Price of Government: Getting the Results We Need in an Age of Permanent Fiscal Crisis” challenged Dominicans to become the next Singapore or Jamaica within 40 years. Osborne commented how both countries were at the same level of poverty in 1960 and how Singapore, primarily due to good government, had forged ahead to become the fourth wealthiest country in the world in terms of per capita income. He observed that the DR holds an advantage because it can study the cases of countries that have gone through the change of downsizing in government.
“If the Dominican Republic is to grow, one of the key factors is the quality of its government,” he highlighted, saying also that private investment follows good governance. He described good government as one that is transparent, honest and has a professional public sector that is free of political patronage, and where the goal is to serve the people and not the politicians. He suggested that public servants be prohibited from campaigning for politicians.
A government in the 21st century needs to be agile, flexible, willing to innovate and constantly seeking improvements in order to thrive in the present information age that is marked by rapid change, new technologies, limited resources and increased competition. Osborne suggested that, instead of maintaining large bureaucracies, governments should subcontract the private sector parties and non-governmental agencies. He stressed the importance of instating accountability and result-oriented, mission-driven systems for both external and internal suppliers and departments.
Osborne urged the government to put a cap on the tax revenues it is taking in. “We cannot keep raising taxes; investment will leave,” he said, emphasizing that the government must find ways to provide better quality services at lower costs.
Osborne sees the primary role of government as a catalyst, in which it steers instead of rowing and serves as a broker and facilitator by leveraging the private sector and NGOs.
He furthermore challenged the government to look into strategies such as that of allotting citizens vouchers so that they may choose the providers of the education of their children, be it in the public or private sector. This system, which he says is already in place in Chile, has served as a way to instill competitiveness, which he stressed is the key to improving the quality of services at a lower cost to all.
Citing his new bestseller, Osborne said that leadership is the most important factor when trying to improve public service with no money. “Great leaders can change and promote certain values and create incentives,” he said. To achieve this change he urged pushing a big idea relentlessly, with small steps and patience.
At the end of the talk, President Leonel Fernandez endorsed the challenge and said that the words spoken there that night consolidated and strengthened the ideas he has had in mind for government since his first administration (1996-2000). The President recalled the first successes achieved in decentralization, such as the passport-in-a-day option and the program to expedite the issue of drivers’ licenses (making them possible to procure even in Helados Bon ice cream shops), and cited them as examples of the vision for modernization in the Dominican government. He admitted that the DR has been implementing the industrial bureaucratic model of the 20th century, but said that now is the time to embrace the double agenda before us. “We must confront the unfinished tasks of the past and the challenges of the present,” he said, and promised that as the Presidential Palace changes, so would the country.