Civil servants as creative intellectuals

Officials set out to invent clan, racial and religious conflicts. In memos to the Colonial Office in London, they vigorously resisted views based on realities elsewhere in the British Empire not similar to realities in Darfur.British writer  John Le Carre’s novels lionise Mr Smiley, a shabbily-dressed self-effacing spook who led MI5 – Britain foreign intelligence […]

Officials set out to invent clan, racial and religious conflicts. In memos to the Colonial Office in London, they vigorously resisted views based on realities elsewhere in the British Empire not similar to realities in Darfur.
British writer  John Le Carre’s novels lionise Mr Smiley, a shabbily-dressed self-effacing spook who led MI5 – Britain foreign intelligence agency –by coming up with brilliant strategies for his field staff. In an autobiography, a novice posted to Afghanistan in the 1930s recalls weekly staff seminars which produced ideas for the Foreign Office; including their proposal for Britain to force Germany into a Second World War if Germany’s aggressive industrial growth was to be derailed before she used it to colonise Europe, including Britain. They were graduates with First Class degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge universities.  
Post-colonial Africa started with primary and secondary school graduates; while ‘’independence’’ mili-tary regimes detested officials they felt despised their exclusion from certificate aristocracy. Under Idi Amin, Permanent Secretaries welco-med military bosses while on their knees to avoid buts of guns across their heads. The military failed to notice the intellectual prowess of colonial managers of empire.
An American diplomat recalls how their research and analysis correctly predicted that Mao Zedung and his Communist rebels would defeat Chiang Kai-Shek’s army. Their advice was ignored by the White House.; its authors were hounded out of their jobs: accused of being agents of Soviet Communism. Their colleagues who invented the ‘’Marshall Plan’’ as a policy for turning post-Second World War Europe into a zone of American exploitation like South America and the Caribbean island countries, fared better. Their policy would be reversed by fears of impoverished Europe being seized by communist parties loyal to the Soviet Union. The policy of making capitalism flourish in Europe to keep out socialism won converts in the American Congress. The domination of America’s foreign service and top administrative federal staff by top graduates from the country’s top IVY League universities, ensured brilliance in policy imagination.
In Israel the spiritual power of martyrdom follo-wing deaths of 6 million Jews in war camps of Germany and Poland; a determination to extract reparations and ‘’Labour Zionism’’ propa-gating work or ‘’avodah’’ as a moment of ‘’worship’’ for the development of a kibbutzim and Israel as a whole, brought the best out of their officials. It is an ethos which despises the individualism which have led to corruption, late-coming and ‘’not on seat’ absenteeism culture in many African bureaucracies.
These examples, contra-dict the myth that civil servants are static ‘’deadwood dullards’’; who are wind vanes periodically adapting to obey dazzling, charismatic, adventurous and visionary politicians as they come and go. Russian communists, however, purged and looked over shoulders of officials inherited from feudal rule and foreign companies operating in Russia, to prevent sabotage of socialist policies through sabotage and inaction.
In China, Mao Zedung’s ‘’Cultural Revolution’’ of the 1960s flushed out; brutally beat; humiliated; deported officials to do manual labour on farms in the countryside, and subjected them to ideological re-education. Those trained in American, British, French and German universities were uprooted as potential informers for foreign governments and companies. The civil servant can be a brilliant intellectual crook.
 Africa should keep in view Japan’s borrowing of German, French, British and American creation of institutions which train ‘Aristocracies of Intellect’ for future leaderships of public administration. They combined it with Chinese worship for scholarship for training Japanese-culture anchored aristocracy of intellect as functionaries of governance. Those who scored topmost grades to enter Tokyo University as the ‘’brightest and the best’’, were highly honoured and respected with the monopoly of command over public policy. Those with the next scholastic scores led the business sector; and accepted their better as guardians of national policies.
In Ghana, Kwame Nkru-mah  trained ideological correctness but kept the colonial civil service un-churned. In Tanzania, Mwalimu Nyerere also trained party officials with ‘’TANU Guidelines’’ and Ujamaa (African Socialism), while the civil service for a while was led by former colonial officials. The country had less than ten university graduates at independence. The ‘’military mutiny’’ of 1964 gave him the opportunity to recruit into a totally new army only TANU party members. Nkrumah lost power to inherited colonial security personnel.
The ‘’myth’’ of a neutral civil service whose incumbents ‘’keep aloof and silent during public debates over policy choices, has had grave effects.  Educated as baskets for colonial educational syllabuses which did not train minds in fighting against colonial exploitation, they were made ‘’untouchables’’ to wild winds of debates by politicians. Their ‘’loyalty’’ to any government in power hide from public view timidity, lack of imagination, duplicity, complicity and mercenary impulses. Their readiness to abandon policies they praise under rapidly abandoned policies during military rule turned the art of ‘’taking things as they are’’ into serving corruption; de-industrialisation; or hawking vast areas of land to foreign companies. The general public know not contents of ‘’their service to their fatherland’’ while betraying their motherland.
The African communal dialogue must include open minds and mouths of civil servants.