July 19, 2022
For some reason I believe these public, private partnerships (PPPs) are nothing short of corrupted deals between policy makers and the private sector? Often times these PPPs end up with the government using tax payers money in the billions without the private sector partner ponying up a dime and it ends up being just another government project.
However, what the private sector is supposed to do is provide for efficiencies and new technology that is not available in the public sector, which is possibly the least outcome of this PPP alliance.
But, how do we make these PPPS work without all of the profligate spending and waste and graft? The first thing must obviously be transparency. There must be teams of independent people from three sides- the private sector, public sector and the civil society who doesn’t have a horse in the race.
I think PPPs can be a great thing, but clearly it is no panacea for developmental efforts. Too often the private sector neglects development for the sake of profit. Governments must be mindful of that.
The government cannot be ran like a corporation, President Barack Obama said it best: “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy.
“Sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences … then I think those suggestions are terrific.
“Sometimes we get, I think, in the scientific community, the tech community, the entrepreneurial community, the sense of we just have to blow up the system, or create this parallel society and culture because government is inherently wrecked.”
You just can’t shut down a government agency because you don’t like the permanent secretary. Government doesn’t work that way and isn’t supposed to work that way.
Be mindful of these PPPs… They seem ready to spend government money to try to run government projects like a private company would. We don’t need that.