Piecemeal solutions to challenges do not work!

A Tmedical school, they taught us, and with a very high degree of emphasis too, never to treat a patient as a case of a disease, or just as a patient, but as a complete human being. They taught us that everyone is originally a normal person before they become a patient.

This means that diseases occur in normal people, who then become patients and not the other way round. No one ever starts as a patient and then becomes a normal disease-free person later on in life after treatment. All patients start as normal people. However, as fresh medical students, our naivety had programmed us to see our clients as patients first and foremost before becoming normal people after our ‘heroically’ treating them!

Our learned medical professors told us that looking at our clients holistically would help us not only to understand their unique medical challenges, but also to know how best we could assist them during the treatment process.

This is the main reason why even after telling the doctor about your presenting complaint, or that compelling reason which brought you to him or her, the doctor would seemingly go off tangent by asking you apparently mundane and irrelevant questions.

These questions usually include questions on the history of the presenting complaint, its characteristics such as duration, frequency and intensity, and then veer off to things like past medical history, social history, family history, and so forth and so on.

Most clients would wonder why the doctor would be wasting time asking them all these irrelevant questions, and yet they are not irrelevant at all.

Answers to these questions assist doctors not only to know and understand the present or current medical challenge faced by the client, but also to know and understand how the client was before the challenge arose so that treatment can be tailor-made to return the client back to their original normal self again.

A patient is not just a case of TB, Malaria, HIV/AIDS, or kidney failure, but a whole person in which the diagnosed disease or condition does not just affect the organ or organs in which it is found, but also the health and wellbeing of the whole patient in other spheres of their life as well. This is pretty obvious to see and know if one has ever been sick. Even just a simple flu would not just affect your nostrils, but it might also cause one to have a headache, joint pains, muscle pains, generalised body malaise, loss of appetite, vomiting, diarrhoea, inability to work and so forth and so on.

REVERSING

Hence focussing only on reversing the nasal blockage, which might come with the flu, or only on just getting rid of the associated headache or cough, would not immediately restore the patient back to normality.

The doctor has to focus on treating the whole person as a person and holistically too, and not just as a case of a simple flu. Such being the case, there may be need to prescribe several remedies all at the same time, including affording time off from work.

This holistic approach to solving challenges is the kind of approach which must be universally applied to all challenges in life no matter what they are. But, is this what we do in our lives on a daily basis?

No, unfortunately it is not! And this failure to apply comprehensive and holistic solutions to challenges in life is the most frequent cause of our repeated failure to resolve most of the challenges which confront us today in all spheres of our lives. Nowhere is this so clearly and well demonstrated as in the business of politics and public administration. And this is the focus of this article.

The biggest and main reason why many countries have failed and continue to dismally fail to resolve their own political, social, economic, financial, health, housing, educational, transport, food, safety, employment, security, land, race, tribal, environmental and many other challenges, is that they fail to approach all these challenges and solutions thereto as well, in a comprehensive and holistic way! They want, try or pretend to solve their challenges as individual challenges and not holistically as community challenges.

ECONOMIC

Just as a disease which may affect or may be found in the liver of a patient does not necessarily originate from the liver itself, and also does not necessarily only affect liver functions alone, social, political, economic and other community challenges do not necessarily originate in the place in which they are found, and neither do they only affect that place alone, but they affect the whole community.

Hence challenges which affect communities are not just political, social, economic, educational, food, transport, safety or security challenges, but they are integrated community challenges. Such challenges must, therefore ,be approached and addressed as community challenges for better success at resolving them. Piecemeal solutions to community challenges do not work at all!

The reasons why most politicians prescribe piecemeal solutions to community and national challenges are numerous and varied. The most common ones are to do with political expediency.

Out of greed and hunger for political power, politicians would say and do any populist things which would ensure that they are elected into power or remain in power, even if and when such things would not be ideal, or would not even work at all! Populism can be very misguided.

Instead of educating voters on the waywardness of populism, politicians would rather just ride on the populist wave, collect votes and get into power. Politicians also prescribe piecemeal solutions to community challenges due to ignorance more than anything else.

Both politicians and communities which they serve are usually very ignorant about the common origins and inter-connectedness of community challenges which confront them.

No one is aware of the fact that every community works in pretty much the same way as the whole human body works. In fact, a community can be equated to the human body in all aspects of how it is constructed and also how it works as well. Now let us take a ride with this analogue below.

BRAINS

The controlling brains of any community or country is its central government. Sitting at the head of the country, central government must put into place solidly built, people-based, people-derived, people driven, people-oriented, age-old, tried and tested, self-controlling, and also self-regulating public administration institutions, systems, processes, mechanisms, visions and values, which would ensure that the whole country and its various constituent communities not only function properly as independent but interconnected operating units, but also function both in unison and also in harmony with each other!

This must include putting into place the heart and life blood of the country in the form of ring-fenced, self-funded, self-administered and self-perpetuating national social security funds to ensure the availability, affordability and accessibility of finances for all basic and essential public services such as food, shelter, housing, health, education, transport, communication, justice, safety and security for all. Public service delivery in any individual community, and also throughout the whole country, must be regulated by central government.

However, it is received wisdom nowadays that actual public service delivery must be left in the very capable, efficient and effective hands of the private sector.

There must always be harmony and unity of purpose between and among all public operators within and throughout the country even though there must also always be complete, true, meaningful and practical separation of people, powers, duties, function and responsibilities between all these public service management, administration and delivery institutions and structures.

ORGANS

This is exactly also how the human body and all its constituent organs work as different but interrelated institutions (organs) of the same human body.

For example, youth unemployment is not just a result of lack of jobs alone, but may also be the aggregate result of bad political, social, economic, educational, financial, monetary, business, social protection and environmental systems.

The same multiplicity of causes can also apply to each and every one of the challenges which may confront any country or whole societies in general.

It is only when all these multiple causes are identified together with their interconnectedness that viable solutions can then be conceived and implemented with any hope of success.

Trying to solve challenges in isolation does not usually work but can actually end up creating other teething challenges somewhere else.

This is the reason why pessimists among us have always cynically observed that solutions to one challenge would always create new problems elsewhere!

With properly informed insights and overviews of challenges and their interconnectedness, such challenges should not arise.

Hence, the adage that piecemeal solutions to challenges do not work still holds true, right? Yes please!