Creating laws and policies without proper implementation is useless

Looks like our solution to everything that we consider a challenge, worthy of our action is to throw a law or policy at it.

The other day it was announced that our country now has a national policy on family promotion and protection. According to the Cabinet dispatch, this policy is meant to ‘address loss of values, dissipating sense of civic duty, skewed work-life priorities and breakdown of our families’.

Apparently, we also have a culture law in the works to ‘celebrate our diverse ethnic and cultural diversity’ that was announced by the despatch. Not that this is the first time we have ever attempted to wiggle down this rabbit hole. Taskforces and commissions have been created in the past to address cultural issues, and at some point, some national contest held to come up with a national dress. The fact that the West African manner of dressing is what many will turn to when confronted with themed cultural events, says something about the success of this initiative.

Obviously, all these laws and policies might be well-meaning. The bigger challenge, however, is in getting them to deliver all these lofty ideals that they are said to be aimed at. Writing up the policy and shepherding it through the approval processes with numerous sessions, where a substantial chunk of public funds often drowns in teas and coffees and pastries, is possibly the easier task.

We need a lot more than enacting laws and policies to get to the destination that we all aspire to, deep inside. Take the sagging sense of national pride, for instance. How could anyone feel anything remotely related to this when the constant reminder by very senior members of society is that the rest of us are second class when it comes to some supposed shareholding of our land of birth?

There is also the issue of national values. How could we preach the water of hard work and honesty and other values, yet down copious amounts of the wine of cutting corners, ill-gotten wealth and the law that is only for the poor people? Where owners of the country and their associates are guaranteed a slap on the wrist with the chains of their bad manners fall off.

Until there is a rule of law, and everyone can expect to pay for their misnomers irrespective of who they are or know, policies can never be the answer. It will not need legislation to exercise civic duty or even ascribe to positive values. Positive role models can do a lot more to inspire a mind-shift change.

Unfortunately, laws are the only tool we seem to have, so every challenge appears like a nail to us. How many times have our legislations been referred to as model and progressive, yet majority are still struggling to get to the promised land of dignified living?

Folklore has it that some of the old policies that our founding fathers drafted and enacted ended up transforming other nations, when diligently applied. Of course, the veracity of this claim cannot be verified and might just be the product of a fertile imagination, perhaps in an inebriated state. However, it does not discount the fact that if laws and policies could make things better.

As we write these laws and policies, we need to figure out how to also breathe life into them through unwavering implementation and enforcement.

@butunyi