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The objective of a week long training session on BPR
for about 300 officials selected from the various
agencies of the city is to enable the participants
to come up with a revised version of a series of
BPR’s for Addis Abeba’s respective bureaus and
agencies adopted from the parallel ministries, and
towns like Bahir Dar.
Top officials of the new Addis Abeba Administration,
including its mayor, Kuma, have frequently stated
that the city does not have enough time to design
its own BPR from scratch.
“Addis Abeba’s problems are pressing. If we focus
only on quick fix schemes, the fundamental changes
would be delayed. Hence, we are not going to conduct
studies to implement BPR; we will, instead, take
lessons from federal and regional institutes and
adopt it to Addis Abeba’s situations,” Kuma told his
council members while presenting his
administration’s comprehensive plan for the 2008/09
fiscal year, during their first meeting held in June
2008.
For the past three years, ministries of the Federal
Government and regional institutes have been very
familiar with the term BPR, as they spent
considerable time preparing and implementing it.
Despite a late start, agencies of the Addis Abeba
City Administration have however, just started to
feel the impact of the new programme. However, the
city needs to make some adjustments to what the
federal institutions have designed and experienced.
“We would take best practices from those federal and
regional institutions that have seen it practically
implemented and come up with a revised BPR that
suits Addis Abeba’s existing realities,” Daba Debele,
head of the city’s Capacity Building Bureau, told
Fortune.
The best practice institutes are from Tigray, Oromia,
Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region (SNNPR)
and Amhara Regional states and some better
performing ministries like the Ministry of Trade and
Industry (MoTI) and Ministry of Works and Urban
Development (MoWUD).
Nevertheless, there are a few members of the City
Council who were not convinced about simply
imitating the federal and regional governments’
experiences, when it was first announced by Kuma in
June.
“No institute has ever experienced the BPR by
practically going through with it. What is it, then,
that Addis Abeba can learn?” a council member asked
at the time.
BPR is a management approach, aiming at increasing
the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes
that exist within and across organizations. The key
to BPR is for organizations to look at their
business process from a “clean slate” perspective,
and determine how they can best construct those
processes to improve how they conduct business.
Both the training and the BPR preparation are
managed by Daba’s Bureau, an office the
administration claims to have given an unprecedented
level of attention.
Of the high priority areas of the new City
Administration, building the capacity of its
institutes tops the list, according to authorities
at the municipality.
Over the years, the absence of capacity building and
reform works has been the root cause for the
problems the city was faced with, and for the
failure to solve them, according to Kuma.
“The next fundamental work will be done on this
issue,” he said during the June council meeting.
On the list of top priorities for the 2008/09 fiscal
year are good governance, justice system reform,
combating illegal practices and implementing the
city charter.
For instance, as a gesture of the level of emphasis
it attaches to the bureau, the administration, has
approved a 19.74 million Br budget for capacity
building works, exceeding the 13.03 million Br
proposed by its predecessor – the Caretaker
Administration of the Firefighter Mayor, Berhane
Deressa – by 51pc.
According to Daba, documents for the implementation
of BPR, expected in two months time are under
preparation.
The other reason that has kept the City
Administration equally busy is the training of
executives at the different levels of the
government. The administration plans to train 2,000
executives under this programme. Up to 942 trainees
who joined the programme on July 8 graduated in
early August.
The training, provided by top officials of the
Federal Government, who are among the architects of
the policies of the ruling Ethiopian Peoples
Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF), mainly
focuses on good governance, maximizing revenue and
tackling corruption.
Among the trainers are Bereket Simon, Public
Relations advisor to Prime Minister Meles Zenawi on
ministerial portfolio, Arkebe Oqubay, state minister
for MoWUD, Kuma and Mekuria Haile, city general
manager.
“I have gained a lot of insight from the training. I
have grasped the basic principles behind the
policies and strategies of EPRDF,” Bekele Gebre,
head of the Gulele District Works and Urban
Development Office told Fortune.
“The training has motivated us to favor public
interests over personal gains,” Bekele said.
Another batch of 1,000 executives has camped for the
same training, while 942 trainees, including Bekele,
have left for their respective offices.
The total focus on BPR preparation and trainings by
the new Addis Abeba City Administration ever since
it took office three months back might have put the
administration on a track for change. Nevertheless,
the subsequent suspension of services seems to have
disappointed residents like Zinash, who could not
meet the officials that are mandated to handle their
cases.
“It is good that they [the administration officials]
apply BPR and undergo trainings as well. But I am
also running against time to get my business up and
running,” Zinahs told Fortune.
The city’s Land Development and Administration
Authority, the office supposed to look into her
requests has about 40 employees, including support
staff, yet it should have 80-90 employees according
to its structure.
Five of its experts have joined the BPR training at
Civil Service College, and the Authority could not
even look through the piled up files to select
information for the city’s Lease Board to make
decisions on, sources told Fortune.
Since its establishment, the Lease Board has held
only one meeting, while there are more than 200
cases waiting for its decision. Though there are
many new land requests coming to the office, they
have not been responded to so far.
Thus, Zinash and others like her, wait for the Land
Authority and the Lease Board to resume their
regular duties as soon possible. |
