Do public sector boards serve any purpose?

The English lexicon says conundrum is a paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma. Talking of conundrums, a celebrated example of a conundrum appears in Alice in Wonderland.

When Alice arrives at "a mad tea party" she notices that the tea party is characterised by switching places on the table at any given time, making short, personal remarks, asking unanswerable riddles and reciting nonsensical poetry.

The Hatter asks Alice a riddle "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" Hatter, of course, said he did not have an answer himself.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the supercomputer, Deep Thought, was asked to find the ultimate answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything.

After seven-and-a-half million years of computation and checking, the answer turned out to be 42. The ultimate question itself, however, was unknown.

When Arthur Dent, the main hero of the book, attempted to extract the ultimate question, he got the question as "What do you get if you multiply six by nine"?
"Six by nine. 42".

"That's it. That's all there is." At this Arthur Dent concluded: "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe."

The boards of public sector enterprises and parastatals, are also confronted with similar conundrums.

The first conundrum: "What is the ultimate purpose of the boards of these enterprises, if these have very little role in strategy formulation?"

Conundrum No 2: "Is it possible to resolve the inevitable conflicts between policy-making, regulation and commercial decision-making of an enterprise that has to function in a competitive market as opposed to a sheltered market?"

Conundrum No 3: "Are there ways in which the government can exercise ownership functions without interfering with the boards of these enterprises?"

Conundrum No 4: "Can the independent directors play an effective and meaningful role when the administrative ministry and the sector regulator are represented on the boards by very senior representatives?"

Conundrum No 5 (which is a corollary to the previous one): "Do independent directors, then, really matter when 'all' is in the family?"

Of course, the underlying Euclidean assumptions behind the last two conundrums are that independent directors are always eager to bring to the board their expertise and wisdom, willing to speak up and contribute in the board meetings and are not simply cheerleaders.

Besides, there are overarching fixed boundary conditions imposed by the Acts that have created many of these enterprises and govern their objectives, purposes, the manner of their functioning, the board composition and selection of directors.

A little examination would show that the difficulty often arises from the dominant logic borne out of deep apprehensions and abounding suspicions that these organisations are not yet mature enough and cannot be left alone, lest they run amuck.

There is also another issue that is not of mean significance. The government inescapably has several "public policy" and "greater social good objectives".

These cannot be avoided, especially in a country like ours, but often give rise to the dominant logic that unless tight control is exercised by the senior representatives of the governments and regulators on the boards of these enterprises, the public policy objectives would be easily thwarted.

Hence, the conclusion that organisations may have commercial objectives, and it is always a good idea to have boards and independent directors, but all cannot be left to them.

They must be tied to the apron strings of the administrative ministries and sector regulators.

This may, however, come in the way of growing the nation's wealth through increase of efficiency of these enterprises through well-functioning boards.

To change all this is not easy. It will only happen when there is inner willingness to change. It is not that we have not witnessed this willingness in the past. But the fears and apprehensions seem to be back now and with renewed