Technical Experts and Underdeveloped Economies

Technical Experts and Underdeveloped Economies
By: Stephen K. Ainsah-Mensah

Underprivileged societies are growing in number. The edifices of their cultures are getting progressively eroded for reasons that are related to unprincipled development plans and/or decisions that deviate from their bedrock cultures. The major problem is usually claimed to be human incompetence. Leaders are not leading well, and the led are not skilled enough to manage resources well. This line of thought is simplistic and is, therefore, in need of inspection.

There is in contemporary business and economics, the prevalent view that poverty could be found and addressed from paper computations relating to how money has been spent and received in the society within a given period of time, say one year. Suppose the former exceeds the latter, and consistently so, resources, most likely, were not used wisely. Learned people are prepared to call this state of affairs a deficit. Even, some die-hard conservative thinkers may state that financial prudence requires that money received ought to exceed money spent or that the two should be equal in order to ensure a healthy economic growth and development. They may state further that this proves that the economy is doing well and will likely do so in the future. The problem with this viewpoint is that it often tends to diverge from humanist approaches to dealing with economic difficulties. Do paper computations really address questions about the equitable or inequitable distribution of social goods/services and wealth in connection with the people? Do experts on paper computations do a painstaking survey about the difficulties and successes of the people under study?

Suppose what is received far exceeds what is spent, meaning there is a surplus but that the average person still finds it hard to make ends meet; suppose, again, that a small group of people are the ones basking in wealth or enjoying life in many different ways, then wealth would not have been evenly distributed, and it would not make sense to state that the economy is doing well. Strict technical experts who are lovers of paper computations would have failed to address crucial problems in a society that registers a marked surplus vis-à-vis the terribly uneven distribution of wealth. In short, their assessments and conclusions tend, in many cases, to be unsympathetic to, and unreflective of, the indigenous culture.

Consider foreign experts who claim that a society’s road to development is faulted because there are wastes of resources on activities that do not generate foreseeable monetary profits. This entails, for them, a significant cut in subsidies that go into public education and health, so that money could be freed for use in paying off debts or for other purposes that could yield significant profits in the short or medium term. It is important to note that for the said experts, large public expenditure on socially unavoidable services is a threat to growth and development. Herein dwells their steady support for profit-yielding structures, services and programs in the areas of private enterprises. The engines of human development, which arise chiefly from quality and accessible health and educational services, are heavily privatized. Experience shows that individuals who have invested so much in private ventures expect the highest possible profits to prove success in business. For this reason, educational and health systems that are heavily privatized in a society where levels of income are generally below the middle level discourages the majority of the people from acquiring quality education as well as accessing quality health facilities. It is unquestionable that a large pool of able-bodied people so vital for production will be lacking in a society that has been deprived of an affordable health system for all. The paper-informed arguments of technical experts, as one can see, may be deficient in human-perceived arguments. Their measures, if implemented, could offend the cultural principles of the society in question and breed, quite frequently, economic and social ruin.

It is probable that countless many problems arise when a society’s knowledge-based and able-bodied-based institutions are privatized, thereby obstructing many a people from accessing them. Education-minded parents with low incomes may strive by any means necessary to put their children in privatized schools. Or, if adults want to pursue high education without adequate finances to support them, they may as well resort to unscrupulous means to achieve their goals. One can be sure that corruption arises from such undertakings and spills over in the society. The same goes for health; for if some people are aware that their health is broken or could be broken and that complex illnesses would require huge finances to deal with them, they may equally choose the route of corruption to counter such problems. The difficulties that are to be found in educational and health systems ought to be addressed from the perspective of how the delivery techniques could encourage pragmatic results. Are educational programs yielding graduates whose contributions to the society are far more pragmatic than before or less so? The latter state of affairs is generally held to be the case with underprivileged societies. To remedy the situation, innovative techniques have to be put in place to make educational institutions more worthwhile, more accessible. Health systems should be in like manner. Since such measures could yield smart school graduates with, of course, practical flair to boot, it is doubtless that to make education easily accessible and more qualitative, public finance for it need not be cut or eliminated. Sometimes, the finance has to be even greater than before. Here, the future benefits of education are far more praiseworthy than the initial injection of high public finance, which technical experts may criticize as engines of inflationary trends. Whatever innovations have been created in the health system, the ultimate goal is to produce physically strong and healthy individuals who are ready to carry the mantle of nation building to enviable heights. Of course, education gives the added support.

But let us be clear on this. Reasoning-on-paper experts have their strengths, their areas of expertise that cannot be overlooked but lauded. Are they not the ones whose proficient calculations warn about the need to reassess how the society was previously managed? They constantly remind us that financial prudence is far more preferable to wastes. But one may criticize their choices on the grounds that they do not consider the human factor as central in their judgements; yet, what one has to understand is that they have a job to do, which is challenging in many respects, computationally innovative, full of technical details though culturally dry in outcomes. If eliminating deficits and generating surpluses is all there is to human development, then one is bound to belittle the conscientious understanding of all shades of people whose presence in the society demand indiscriminate attention if the society is to attain the dignity of growth and development. Humanists are at odds with the kind of growth and development that technical experts may proffer; and this is where differences in opinions, contentions, conclusions arise ; that is, indeed, a problem of sorts!

Go a little further in analyzing the presuppositions of technical experts, and you would realize that the consequences of their recommendations tend to create a train of outcomes that were, perhaps, previously not envisaged or realized. These, of course, are recommendations that tend to yield the conscience to the principle of utmost carefulness in the management of all kinds of resources. They warn that money cannot be thrown about - and anyhow - when it is a question of seeking to promote growth and development in sectors of the economy; but this rigidity, while admirable, is also the beginning of activities that turns in all kinds of foreign-centred involvements in the economy and generates entirely different degrees of growth and development in the given culture. An illustration is here crucial.

Foreign technical experts come to society Q to study the causes and consequences of the rising underdevelopment. Their recommendations, as usual, include reducing or eliminating public expenditure on social goods/services. Privatization is well recommended. But, then, local skills to manage privatized ventures are lacking culminating in the experts insisting that foreign experts be brought in to assist. The experts usually are to be paid in marketable foreign currencies, and they come in increasing numbers to manage sectors of the economy that are claimed to be short of local expertise. On top of this, growth and development are also perceived to include technical and hi-tech products and all sorts of products that were previously unavailable or in short supply. Even foreign foodstuffs invade the indigenous culture as it is held that their importation is far less costlier than producing them locally. However, foreign experts drain the foreign currency reserves of the society; and where the reserves is not there, it is a matter of course that the society in question has to borrow overseas money to retain non-indigenous skills. From this point on, the foreign debt of the society tends to accumulate. And to encourage the sale and use of all kinds of technological and high-tech products such as flashy cars, TV sets, electronic gadgets or equipment, etc. in a society with generally low income levels, in a society whose cultural structure does not correspond in large measure to an evolution of such products, only endangers the naturalness of culture. This mode of development is simply unsustainable. It has the tendency of leading to cultural and economic barrenness. Whether a hybrid culture could arise from the encounter between the foreign culture and the indigenous one is not the issue.

The problem to face, time and again, is the disorientation of indigenous resources. \Whatever the level of difficulties the indigenous society faces, the point ought to be hammered home that indigenous resources should not be sacrificed for foreign resources. The latter should be inclined toward reinforcing the advancement of the former.