By Dr Tafataona Mahoso
THERE will be no shortage of mission statements and star-gazing visions during the on-going election campaign.
Therefore, this is the time for those whose work involves real long-term strategic thinking to ponder the issue of vision/mission versus securing a sustainable national skills base from which the country can always build effective and efficient administrations both in the public and private sectors.
My April 27 2023 instalment was titled, ‘Character laundering more treacherous than money laundering’.
In other instalments, I have wondered why the country’s adoption of the Integrated Result-Based Management (IRBM) system since 2014 is not paying the dividends one would expect after such a long time and long-term investment.
Could it be that application of the IRBM system, which is technical, needs to be preceded by a different system of management leadership selection focusing entirely on qualities that cannot be taught via a one-day or one-week workshop?
I pose this question because people I talk to all lament the shocking deterioration of work standards and the shameful absence of a national work ethic in all sectors.
Don’t get me wrong.
There is plenty of rhetoric and there are countless strategic plans and manifestos which all boil down to repeated statements of good intentions.
But there is very little on the ground to show that we are making progress which is consistent with our rhetoric. Some observers have even gone as far as suggesting that there are too many bad people occupying high public positions who should not have been allowed anywhere near a public office if we had such a qualitative system of selection preceding IRBM training.
In other words, we are wasting expensive IRBM training on rotten apples.
What they lack is not just managerial skill but moral/ethical character and standards.
If we just take the capital city, Harare, a Clean Up Campaign has officially been in place for more than two years now.
There is a clear Mission Statement of ‘World Class City by 2025’ and we are in 2023.
There is not a single indicator convincing city dwellers that, in two years from now, Harare will have attained ‘world class’ status, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Harare is not even basically clean, without bringing in any criteria to do with ‘world class’. There is no evidence of a popular mindset among the city leaders or the people showing commitment to sustain a Clean Up Campaign.
People are pre-occupied with cut-throat survival hassles and couldn’t be bothered with hygiene or good image for Harare or for Zimbabwe.
The politicians are concerned with moving the Government to Mt Hampden, but it is not clear whether the trash culture of Harare in the last 20 years will disappear, or follow Government offices to Mt Hampden, or remain behind and get worse.
What is clear is that Harare, as a city administration, is not committed to the clean city vision whether we are in 2025 or 2050.
Harare, as a city administration, is concerned with squeezing revenue from renting parking space and from taxing struggling tuckshops and little entrepreneurs living from hand-to-mouth.
The administration’s priorities can be seen from the commitment of personnel and motor vehicles to the various departments.
Those who collect revenue and squeeze high fees from little shops and motorists are the most mobile and most aggressive.
Crafting a vision or building a competent team?
The City of Harare presents a microcosm of problems bedevilling the nation in both the public and private sectors.
Recently, the High Court compelled the ZETDC to pay the equivalent of
USD$20 000 as compensation to a young man who was injured by live electricity cables left uncovered by ZETDC workers after a repair job.
City of Harare workers are also routinely accused of abandoning open pits and ditches after repairing water or sewer pipes on busy roads.
If we talk to people who depend on public clinics and hospitals for health services, we are likely to hear similar complaints about disgruntled workers and an appalling work ethic and professional standards in health institutions.
The public transport system is plagued by similar challenges.
Clients routinely complain of dreadful treatment and poor service standards.
And yet we are talking about being internationally competitive and attaining middle-income status by 2030.
There is something we are doing wrong at the organisational or corporate level when we set up companies, public entities and even Government departments.
A while back, I analysed my encounters with the ‘Our turn to eat’ syndrome in the public sector and how it had compromised well-intentioned policies on the promotion of young people, on the integration and promotion of women, and on handover-takeover and induction procedures.
Stop-gap measures like increasing wages do not seem to resolve the basic challenges.
According to Jim Collins, in ‘Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make The Leap…and Others Don’t’:
“The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviours from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus (or in the entity) in the first place, and to keep them there.”
Defining a vision and mission are important but that should not be the first consideration.
If we have people of the required high calibre, good aptitude and character, they will have no difficulty defining a vision and mission based on clear analyses of the brutal facts of the social, political and economic environment facing and surrounding them.
Says Collins: “First, if you begin with ‘who,’ rather than ‘what,’ you can more easily adapt to a changing world. If people join the bus (or entity) primarily because of where it is going, what happens if you get 10 miles down the road and you need to change direction? You’ve got a problem. But if people (managers) are on the bus (or enterprise) because of who else is on the bus, then it’s much easier to change direction…Second, if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people (rather than manage work) falls away. The right people don’t need to be tightly managed (micro-managed) or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great. Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people (or great team) is irrelevant.”
What sort of working teams are running our institutions?
How were they put together?
What should we look for when trying to put together effective teams to build long-term institutions?
It is a good African practice to listen to advice from outsiders as long as you know how to use it in your own context and as long as you have your own ideas.
As our ancestors taught us: “Zano pangwa uine rako.”
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder Prime Minister of Singapore, gave us this testimony in his book, ‘From Third World To First’: “The single decisive factor that made for Singapore’s development was the ability of its Ministers and the high quality of the civil servants who supported them.
Whenever I had a lesser Minister in charge, I invariably had to push and prod him, and later to review problems and clear road-blocks for him.
The end result was never what could have been achieved.
When I had the right man in charge, a burden was off my shoulders.
I needed only to make clear the objectives to be achieved, and the time frame within which he must try to do it, and he would find a way to get it done.”
Lee Kuan Yew was one of those leaders who believed that a good system alone could not bring about good results in spite of the bad character of those occupying key positions.
He wrote: “My experience of developments in Asia has led me to conclude that we need good people to have good government.
However good the system of government, bad leaders will bring harm to their people.
On the other hand, I have seen several societies well-governed in spite of poor systems of government, because good, strong leaders were in charge.”
In the book already cited (p. 51), Jim Collins goes as far as arguing: “People are not your most important asset. The right people (only) are…Not that specific knowledge or skills are unimportant, but…these traits (are) more teachable (or at least learnable), whereas…dimensions like character, work ethic, basic intelligence, dedication to fulfilling commitments, and values (such as honesty and common decency) are more ingrained.”
In all sectors, we need leaders who demonstrate and inspire a high degree of reliability, trustworthiness and diligence.
Example of the spread of tick-borne disease in resettlement areas (2016-2021)
Parallel to the spread of a scandalous trash culture in urban centres, like Harare, was the spread of a long-forgotten tick-borne disease called Theileriosis and notoriously known in Zimbabwe as ‘January disease’, which killed mostly resettled farmers’ cattle and drastically reduced draught power in rural areas, thereby reversing the growth of the sector recorded in the first decade after the fast-track land resettlement programme.
There were some really shocking features of this crisis, including the following:
- Shortage of dipping chemicals;
- Lack of basic veterinary information;
- The rise of quack veterinary ‘experts’ using fake drugs and claiming to be able cure the disease. At one time they were charging US$10 per beast supposedly to prevent infection and US$20 per beast supposedly to ‘cure’ infected animals;
- Lack of transport and supplies for the genuine Government vet officers to service the vast areas for which they were responsible.
It took much too long to bring the disease under control, which task just requires adequate veterinary information, adequate and affordable supplies of tick grease and dipping chemicals as well as popularisation of the fight to eradicate ticks from cattle stocks.
It has been alleged that the January disease epidemic was triggered by corrupt Government officials who diverted dipping chemicals from Government stores to private ranchers and replaced stocks with diluted residues which they passed for tick-control drugs.
Much of the blame is also put on poor salaries in the public sector, exposing veterinary officers to bribery by private ranchers and drug sellers.
Whatever the true causes may be, they also point to the destruction of the work ethic and the erosion of moral character in the public sector.
I need not mention that the January disease epidemic in the agriculture sector ran its course side by side with the IRBM programme adopted in 2014, two years prior to the beginning of the epidemic.
It should be clear that talk about mechanising the small farm sector cannot by-pass or ignore the destruction of ox-drawn tillage power.
In fact, many resettled farmers were already transiting from ox-drawn ploughs to tractors and other machinery when the tick-borne disease epidemic struck.
They have suffered a real set back.
As for veterinary and other extension services, the temptation is to assume that improving salaries, providing transport and other amenities will be enough to uplift the resettlement sector.
A lot more needs to be done, beginning with the development of committed leadership and the revamping of work culture in the entire sector.
As things stand, we are settling back to a dangerous neo-colonial situation where big agribusinesses gobble up all the credit and services while resettled farmers wait for inadequate seasonal handouts from the State. The agribusinesses are urged to assist small resettled farmers but they would prefer to take over and privatise the land when resettled farmers fail.
Meanwhile, the donors are also keen to maintain the artificial division between peasant farmers and resettled farmers.
They continue to shun resettled areas which they call ‘contested land’ and prefer to focus on communal villages.
In this situation, the skilled agricultural workers also choose to work for the big agribusiness estates or for donors working on communal projects.
Banks have also maintained a similar attitude.
They will not accept, as collateral, State-issued offer letters in the possession of resettled farmers.
There is, therefore, an urgent need for leadership to rethink the agricultural sector as one and adopt a coherent national policy away from the tripartite system of communal, resettled and commercial.
