Qualities of Management: Challenges for Africa's Managers In The Years Ahead

The 26th Tom Mboya Annual Lecture Before The Kenya Institute of Management

Dr. K. Y. Amoako, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary, ECA
6 November 1996
Nairobi

Excellencies,

Honored Academics,

Leading managers of the Public and Private Sectors,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

My colleagues at ECA and I are honored by this occasion. I want to warmly thank the respected Kenya Institute of Management for inviting me to address you on the occasion of the 26th annual Tom Mboya Lecture. We are in the area of the world with rightful claims as the birthplace of mankind and yet politically we are a young people...remembering within our lifetimes those who helped found our independent countries, those who inspired us as students, those who helped us determine our own paths. Tom Mboya was such a person and it is an inspiration of the Kenya Institute of Management that his leadership and vision of a better Africa for all Africans is kept alive through this lectureship. One cannot be but awed both by the charge of the lectureship itself and this august audience, as well as by those who have proceeded me to this podium. I am so pleased that ECA has been a part of this series and that in appearing before you I have the honour of following in the footsteps of two great ECA leaders, Robert Gardiner and Adebayo Adedeji.

They in their era of leading ECA often were called upon to provide an overview of Africa's development prospects. It is a tradition which deserves to be followed as we all need occasions where we step back and take in an encompassing view.

If we look at Africa's development today with the kind of overview we have when looking at the map of this grand continent, we see a dynamic Africa, one where many countries are progressing, and some are not. In fact, we see a differentiating Africa, an Africa which is not easy to characterize since averages tend to hide reality. After all, if Bill Gates were in this room we could say that the average wealth among us was a billion shillings. We have to be careful about averages. Nonetheless, we do see a lot of progress on the continent. Growth rates positive for most countries, half of our countries growing in excess of population growth rate and of those a third growing at twice or more their population growth rate; growth poles in the Northern and the Southern parts of our continent; a number of countries moving beyond adjustment; and a number tackling what had been stalled social progress. With these and many other indicators, we see a determined Africa, an Africa where a younger generation is asserting its commitment to growth and progress, an Africa of expanding internal ties with an awareness of the need for Africa to stake its place in the global economy. It is this Africa which, for the first time in many years, affords us the luxury of well-grounded optimism about our future. A future where with diligence in a generation we can sharply, and I mean sharply, reduce the scourge of absolute poverty which now afflicts two out of five on this continent. Thus an Africa where the basic needs of education and health services and decent shelter are being met and where economic growth is powering the enhanced well being of our peoples. This vision of progress can well be our fate...but not if we in the public and private sector act as if we were passengers along for the ride. No, this vision of progress will only become reality if we are talented drivers of the economy, making long-sighted choices and staying with the tasks. It is in directing, leading, influencing and operating development tasks that management comes in and it in this address I would like to focus on qualitative issues facing the management of Africa's development in the years ahead. To me the qualitative issues are the big ones. It amazes me to see many academic institutions treat management as a science. When we deal with humans behavior, as we do in all development fields, we work in an art, not a science. Even accounting is a behavioral art because it establishes incentives, rules and systems which guide organizational behaviour. Even my own so-call "dismal science" field of economics is turning out to be an art where behavioral and institutional insights are holding their own against those who once preached that mathematical models could suffice. No, it is those who manage the qualitative issues of choice, of human organization, of private and public policies intended for the good of peoples that are at the centre of our future. Recognizing the choices these manager will be making and preparing them to make informed choices in key fields will determine the world of our old age and of our children's prime. Managing for Quality is at the heart of what leading institutions like KIM is doing and will be doing in the years head.

To my mind, the first development management choice we must make is to deliberately choose to eliminate poverty on our continent. Ending poverty has always been the purported heart of development...but we must confess that poverty has often been neglected in the management of development . To end poverty it is necessary to have growth...but it is not sufficient. The highest payoffs in development are found in basic education and basic health. It is impossible to conceive of a developed country without an educated, healthy people. It is impossible to have an end of poverty without education and health services. Yet too many African countries act as if these foundations of development were postponable until they were fully affordable. The truth is that no society thinks education and health is affordable, but all societies must make the effort, nonetheless. New technologies, more reliance on local community management and many other innovations make these core social development tasks more doable. We in the United Nations are mobilizing very significant efforts to be as helpful as we can to those states which commit themselves to broad-based nation-wide education and health services. The United Nations System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, which I co-chair with the Administrator of UNDP, is the first time all UN agencies, including the Bretton Woods Institutions, have made a major development commitment in a coordinated way. While this Initiative was well received throughout the world when it was launched last March, there were press speculations (a number from this City) that questioned whether the Special Initiative was legitimate and really was intended for implementation. I am here to tell you that the Initiative is real and has led a number of states to work on universal basic education and basic health plans. The World Bank, UNESCO, WHO, UNICEF and UNDP are active in both these sectors and already there are national programs being organized in Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Mali, Uganda and Mauritania. As this Initiative gets better known I believe many more states will take advantage of it.

If ending poverty is the first challenge of development, then sustainable development is the second challenge. The nexus of high population growth rates, an extensive rather than intensive agricultural system and a fragile ecology are creating havoc with Africa's prospects. It is not just loss of flamingos at Lake Nakuru or the frictions between settled farmers and pastoralists sadly seen in this country. Already 10 African countries are short of water and another 10 are soon to join this unenviable category. Unless food security is assured, the food import bill forecast in another generation might affect us like the debt and following adjustment crises of the 1980s and early 1990s. Meanwhile the fundamentally adverse ecological trends of erosion, deforestation and pollution continue.

The art of management of the nexus issues might well be the most critical management issue facing our continent. What is first missing is a sense of urgency about these issues....to act in the spirit of the title of my country-man Kofi Awoonor's novel: This Earth, My Brother. There is need to better inter-relate the nexus agriculture, environment and population issues in managing fundamental public policies. There is need to foster new industrial, agricultural, agro-forestry and sanitation practices. And there is need to cast curricula on economic management to focus far more centrally on management of sustainable development. At this stage we hardly have identified the best practices in management of the nexus issues, who is doing well on these issues and how they brought about progress. Yet there are positive signs at least from countries with good natural resource endowments which had been mis-managed in the past. For example, Zambia is making the switch from a major food importer to a sizeable food exporter. And Ethiopia's progress in maize production has been excellent. Africa's fate need not be that of recurrent food shortages, masses of unemployed people and shrinking useable land and forests, but hard decisions, long-term planning and careful husbanding of resources will need to be far more the order of the day. If management encompasses leadership and execution, then public and private sector management will be put to its most severe tests on the nexus issues. These are not our children's issues, they are our issues to secure an acceptable quality of life for our children..

Management is also the skill of well utilizing available resources. We often exclaim the truism that Africa's greatest resource is its people. But the reality, proven by numerous statistical studies, is that we misuse our greatest resource. Our productivity record does not stand up well to international comparison. Ironically, the poorest often maximize their resources better than the richer segments of the population. It is in our so-called white collar professions, where we spend our lives, that maximizing of human resources is not taking place. And the major lost opportunity is that of involving women more fully in our modernizing, entrepreneurial, public service and leadership classes. Able-bodied Africans do not go about with one eye shut, hopping on one foot and with one arm tied behind our back. But we are managing our development that way by failing to find economically productive partnership between the genders. As in the case of sustainability, equity does not come about by exhortation or by chance. It comes about by deliberate, informed, fair and professionally sound policies and administration. Such practices are not secrets: they can be found within Africa and elsewhere. Managing for inclusion can be studied, can be taught, can be instituted. But, frankly, this is not a women's issue, it is a societal issue requiring the leadership of both men and women as well as the exercise of creativity in academia, business and the public sector. It is easy to say the basis of gender inclusion is morality, justice and civil rights. But solid management leaders also must make the case to themselves and to others as to the high economic benefits, the high social benefits, and, I daresay, the high political benefits of inclusion. At ECA we believe that every single one of our programmes must be inclusive.

It is this sense of trying to foster the strengths within our societies which has led ECA's own approach to development management. We desire to help foster the better management of the public sector, the private sector and of civil society. It was not so many years ago that management of development and management of the public sector were almost synonymous. Now, with pluralizing societies, the challenges are more complex and the opportunities for progress more diversified and possible. In the public service there is an almost universal demand for better service, more transparency and accountability; for civil service reforms; for improving the management of public services and for privatizing that which the private sector can do better. Up to recently these issues have somehow been seen as alien to us, an imposed agenda from Washington funding agencies. But now, with help from groups like the Kenya Institute of Management, we now rightly see the issues as part of our own responsibilities. To further Africanize these issues we must become better acquainted with breakthroughs in our own continent. That is why ECA is planning to foster a Forum on Privatization so that our own experiences can be assayed and so that our considerable progress in a number of country-specific functions can be appreciated.

Similarly, the management of the private sector is receiving far more attention on this continent. We obviously have some solid management stories on this continent, including diversified industrialists who in a matter of a few decades have honestly created billion dollar empires. Our own view is that a lot can still be done by African governments to facilitate private sector development at all levels. Special focus is needed on the small scale sector and on fostering the transit of the small to the middle scale. We also believe that strong associations of entrepreneurs, some of which still need to be gender based, can lead to a better recognition of public policy needs and to the possibilities of productive South-South linkages with counterpart organizations around Africa and around the world.

The realm of civil society...professional associations, NGOs of all kinds, community groupings, etc., collectively is one of the most vibrant forces on the continent with a growth curve which seems to be practically vertical. These organizations are increasingly serving as valuable agents of development and some are tangibly furthering the process of peace among peoples, as seen in the Horn and in the transition to an inclusive South Africa. Both the process of development and the process of peace is now seen as the monopoly of no own and the responsibility of everyone. Helping civil society hit its stride in Africa is a task which good public managers can foster through friendly policies...the policies of the enabling environment which the Aga Khan first discussed in this country a decade ago...and by strengthening civil society organizations to make them better managers for development and for peace. At ECA we shall help this task by establishing a centre to promote the strengthening of such organizations. After a few years this will be spun off as an autonomous organization.

As we address our challenges for the future: our possibilities for high, yet sustainable growth, for retarding and eliminating absolute poverty, for inclusion of Africa's human resources, and for fostering the public, private and civil society sectors, the quality of the systems we deploy and the management actions we take will be critically important. Perhaps the issues around the information revolution provide the greatest challenges for managing Africa's development. Some are skeptics about computers. The Guardian (London, July 22, 1996) a while ago not so kindly proclaimed that "all computers do for Third World countries is chronicle their decline." That view could not be more wrong. Computers and the information revolution are a way out of, not a way into decline.

The issues of managing Africa's information revolution seem simple, but are turning out to be complex and, to many African countries, fraught with political implications. The core issue is whether an information society will be fostered in Africa. This year, African governments have already agreed to foster an information society and have asked ECA to help promote national informatics plans as the basis of important actions. The difficulty comes when certain national policies are under discussion. Will there be unfettered access to the global information highway? Will tariff structures for equipment and for operating expenses be reasonable even to the point of bending over backward to allow people access to information? Will telephone connections be expedited so that people do not have a wait of 10 years and more in some countries to get connected? Will systems be constructed so that more than the elites gain access? And will censorship be avoided as a consideration so that the free flow of information, the guiding consideration of the information highway, is assured?

These issues do have their complexities, but the stakes in their solution are simply enormous and must be better understood. We can do a lot more to aggregate the huge private sector and public sector interests in making electronic communication and computers a far greater part of our present and future. There must be every effort to clear out the underbrush on these issues to assure every encouragement towards the application of information technology to our development. Officials must see that roadblocks on these issues will block growth prospects.

At the same time, we must assure that Africa is no mere bystander on the information highway...merely taking in what is there without making our own contributions. It is important that African information be carried on the highway. There is a substantial demand for African information. ECA's own electronic information systems are being accessed 100,000 times a month. In the U.S. a news service on Africa is receiving 100,000 "hits" a week. We have not begun to scratch the surface of development applications of electronic information and computation. Community information centres will become the libraries of tomorrow. Trade relations within Africa and between Africa and the rest of the world will be a major matter when we are better linked to the several electronic trade information systems in Asia, Latin America and elsewhere...and when Africans develop our own trade opportunities information systems to a far higher degree than the businessman has today. If we skew the quality of our management systems to the future, to informatics, to new forms of participation and inclusion, to the best practices we can locate, then we can far better assure that Africa is not marginalized from the march of progress. Already we can say that Internet connectivity should be a matter of just a few years for most of Africa and that we can foresee a time, quite near I believe, when Africa will produce at least software for the international market. New methods of access, new ways to manage information, a free flow of information and widespread access will transform not only private sector organizations but, with insight and deliberate public policies, will enrich our socieities. Egypt has made great strides in these directions. So has South Africa. Others of us can leapfrog many steps in development if we pursue informatics creatively and boldly. If you want to write me on this, I'll give you my e-mail address, I would like to see that you receive offers of our CD-ROM series and I'll help get you connected to ECA's Pan African Development Information Service, now late in its second decade of operations.

I want to mention a few other quality issues on which managers should, in my view, devote more study and actions.

I have mentioned poverty and gender as key concerns. These issues can be embraced under the heading of managing for equity. The equity issue goes exactly to the question of what kind of Africa we want to see in the years ahead. Do we want an Africa polarized by the ghettos of the rich and the ghettos of the poor, by gender suppression, by ethnic strife, by class conflict, by clashes between pastoralists and settled farmers? Of course not. That is the sad Africa of Liberia, of Rwanda/Burundi, of Somalia, of Southern Sudan. These are the problems of your neighborhoods and your borders. How can we achieve an Africa at peace, where all parts work for progress, if we do not manage so that everyone has a fair opportunity for progress? And yet how often do we teach the art of inclusion...of management in multi-ethnic settings, of management which promotes gender partnerships, of management which develops opportunities for full participation in the economy? These are not easy questions, but they are questions which must be addressed if Africa's most fundamental management issue...creating viable societies...is to be settled.

Second, I want to say that the philosophy of maximizing use of our human resources places a special burden on recognizing and utilizing indigenous resources. I am not trying to be xenophobic or racist, but I am trying to be realistic. When we purchase goods and services, we all look for price, quality and availability. But when you come from a former colony, as most of us do, we have been schooled to look at the foreign catalog first and perhaps exclusively. A former leader of a large African country retired to a large agricultural operation and said that only after he was a head of state did he begin to understand that he could find cheaper quality, better delivery time and better price within Africa for many items he purchased for his farm than by shopping in Europe. Many an African millionaire industrialist has been created based upon that same dynamic. The difficulty often is that we are unaware of our own comparative advantages. If that is true in industrial supplies, it is even more true in terms of intellectual firepower. We do without or we buy consulting services outside of Africa when there are growing centres of competence all around the continent....as well represented in the ranks of this fine organization. A predecessor of mine at ECA and the top advisor at UNDP made a study of technical assistance in Africa and found things truly out of balance. In Mozambique the bill for aid-funded technical assistance...largely paid to high priced non-Africans...was seven times the cost of the country's entire national and local public payroll. I truly believe that in a large number of tasks, the talent on this continent is competitive in terms of quality and price. And I also believe that when we over-rely upon non-African suppliers we mis-manage not only our procurement budgets, but our public image. We play into the hands of those who marginalize us by saying that there is nothing to buy within Africa so why look at its trade and investment possibilities. We at the renewing ECA are buying African talent wherever possible. We believe that an old pattern in which we were largely a self-contained institution was wrong on two counts: it did not help the quality of our work by neglecting the huge intellectual resources on the continent, and it did not promote the Africa of today and tomorrow by showcasing Africa's talents. We will be conducting most of our work in partnerships with other institutions and by taking advantage of the new storehouses of talent on the continent...and in the African diaspora. I know that I am preaching to the converted on this issue. After all, if KIM did not want to promote utilization of trained African talent, who would? But the issue goes beyond KIM to all senior managers on this continent. In Africa we have been so fragmented that we must take extra steps to know in a commercial sense who we are and where we are. I hasten to add, that ECA also fully recognize the benefits of stronger ties with the South and to helping Africa attain better trading opportunities with the industrialized countries in our post-Uruguay Round environment. The point is that management must look for opportunities to build our strengths everywhere and that too often we do not look inside Africa and that this neglect costs us both in terms of paying more for goods and services while imposing high opportunity costs in terms of neglected opportunities to build a stronger Africa.

We must also build up our financial resources. It is a very large question. Currently Africa relies, in my view excessively, on foreign aid for its development investments. Some would say that we must continue to rely on foreign aid since foreign direct investment by-passes Africa. But that is only a partial analysis. We all know that over-reliance on external finance carries risks. It skews the quality of development and it makes one dependent upon decisions made elsewhere.

Africa now faces a situation where an often determining segment of our development investment, foreign aid, is in decline in real terms worldwide. Africans from virtually every part of the continent are asking ECA to explore options for development investment in the years ahead and it is exactly the right question. In a logical world, substitutes for foreign aid would be created for the Asian and Latin American countries which can afford unsubsidized development so that remaining foreign aid programmes could be concentrated on the poorest countries. Such a world will come about, but it may well materialize too late for this generation of development. In the meantime, Africa must find its own options.

One option, of course, is to make better use of the aid that is offered. Both at the multilateral level, through the United Nations System-wide Special Initiative on Africa, and at the bilateral level, with the May 1996 agreement of the members of OECD's Development Assistance Committee, there is unprecedented agreement to coordinate donor programmes to serve key national priorities in basic education, health, sustainable food and environment, and for the reduction of poverty. But to take advantage of these offers, solid national plans need to be put together. In the absence of such plans, donors will continue to in their amazing proliferation and diversity. African states must manage the donor field by shepherding them to common purpose through compelling national programmes, to provide, particularly, for universal, good quality basic education and basic health services.

Beyond aid programmes, the main option for us is to mobilize our domestic savings more forthrightly for development. In a number of African countries organized capital markets are in operation or are underway. One needs foresight to be sure that these markets operate with efficiency, that they generate more investment in general, and that such investment as is generated is at least in part mobilized for human development. The issues are technical and often complex. And they are not just national issues if inter-state cooperation is anticipated. Some believe that if capital markets are set up with enough similarity it will become easier to mobilize intra-African finance through the cooperation of capital markets. Some even call for the creation of sub-regional capital markets. Because we at ECA believe that the experience of creating capital markets needs to be shared, capacities enhanced, and that inter-state cooperation needs to become possible, we are taking the lead with a number of partners in establishing an African Capital Markets Forum. We announced this forum at a major conference on investment in Africa which we held this past June in cooperation with the World Bank, IFC, African Development Bank, Government of Ghana, a number of bilateral donors, several major corporations and the broadcaster CNN.

The African Capital Markets Forum should assist in the creation of markets which trade not only equities, but debt instruments. Over time, domestic savings, translated into debt instruments, should be tapped for development tasks, such as funding of public or private social development and infrastructure, ranging from public hospitals to private universities. Kenya is one of the few African countries where the public trading of bonds for financing development might have current potential. Again the question is quality: not just that capital markets are established and function, but whether the investments generated serve development as fully as possible.

Naturally, it almost goes without saying that solid capital markets require a well fostered and well-regulated financial services sector. Increasingly that sector must also allow for micro-operations, particularly micro-credit. Every issue seems to have its moment, and for the field of micro-credit, the moment may well be in 1997 when over 3,000 people will gather under NGO auspices, with the support of a number of leading finance ministers and bankers, to plan an expansion of micro-credit to reach half the world's poor families within a decade. There are some very significant South-South lessons for us to learn from countries like Bangladesh and Indonesia in mobilizing micro-credit to be a real force in development finance. The Micro-Credit Summit and the lessons from successful cases indicate to me that there is an enormous potential to mobilize the savings of the very poor, to extend credit to the poor...whose repayment records are often far superior to the repayment records of the rich...and to directly mobilize development at economic levels hard to otherwise reach.

Two other means to reduce the reliance upon foreign aid are reduced debt repayments and better trade access. These topics are part of our work. There is great interest in the recent initiatives of the World Bank and the IMF on multilateral debt reform and on the work just beginning at the World Trade Organization on Africa's trade issues. The matters are responsibly on the table for discussion and there are decent opportunities for Africa to work together for progress on these issues.

In talking about these issues today, I have not just outlined opinions and wishes. These are the emphases which today and tomorrow's Economic Commission for Africa will be pursuing. A careful analysis by six expert teams, a careful internal reflection drawing upon all our professional staff and the Staff Council, a careful consultative process with our clients and partners, and a lot of creativity and, I have to admit, courage, have resulted in a new Commission for a new era. We are putting in place a new management team, a new programme, new modalities of operations, a host of efficiency steps, new technologies, new working relationships, new products and a new managment philosophy. We will be heavy on electronic information systems; heavy on networking, including partnering with groups such as the Kenya Institute of Management rather than trying to be a self-contained institution; we will be demand-driven, economizing, diversifying resources, investing heavily in capacity building, utilizing media...in short, a renewed organization geared for the next decades. If I speak to you of a new era of management in Africa, it is as a participant, as a fellow-student in the art form of making real the visions of a positive future, and it is as a kindred soul with your own efforts to enhance the public and the private sectors for a better Africa for all our communities, all our peoples, all our families.

May our children look back at our era in gratitude that we built the foundations of their progress with our own caring, with inclusiveness for all Africans bridging the superficial distinctions of tribe, religion and gender; that we forged our own policies for sustained progress, and that our own commitments were to an Africa where the quantity and the quality of development are furthered in tandem. If we balance our pursuit of quantity with vigour in our pursuit for the management of high quality development, these discussions will have served usefully, then the intent of the founding fathers of African development such as Tom Mboya will have been nobly carried out.

Mr. Chairman,

Ladies and Gentlemen,

Managers for Today and Tomorrow,

I shall not forget the honour you have given me in listening to my remarks. I can only hope that the ideas presented will be the basis of a dialogue and a partnership in the years ahead. In West Africa we say: "A paddle here, a paddle there -- the canoe stays still." With partnership we on this continent will not stay still. We will move together towards an Africa once thought only the stuff of dreams, but now within our grasp.

Thank you.