Maputo Lessons

Why are Kenyan Presidents always late? Also published in the Business Daily on June 3, 2014.

Several things jumped out at me at a set of panel discussions last week in Maputo. Some were relatively minor, and some major, but each was eye-opening in a way that told a lot about our present, and our future.

The Africa Rising narrative has been on everyone’s lips for a while now, and the conference in Mozambique, organised and hosted by the International Monetary Fund, actually had that as its theme and title. It could have been boring, with the same old faces and boldface names mouthing platitudes and half-heartedly trying to do deals in the backrooms. But no, this actually ended up being interesting in quite useful ways.

The first thing I noticed – that any Kenyan noticed – was that the conference began bang on time. This was despite the fact that – or maybe even because – the President of Mozambique was in attendance. Remember, this was a conference that brought together the majority of Africa’s finance ministers, central bank governors and private sector heavy hitters. But when they said the meeting would begin at 8:30, it did.

This is in marked contrast to what happens here. Almost every single meeting involving high government officials (and all too often, private sector head honchos as well), will not begin on time. Most times, it has nothing to do with traffic problems (the President does not sit in traffic, does he?), or logistical snafus. It is, from where I sit, a curious admixture of old-fashioned self-importance and a traditional African disregard for time.

What it leads to, in many cases, is an inability to predict the length of meetings. Whenever we plan live coverage of high-level events at the NTV newsroom, we wonder whether to cut ourselves slack (and take the risk of the meeting actually beginning on time), or go by what’s on paper and then have to fill dead airtime with inanities. And I’m the best at live inanities (followed by Larry Madowo), but at least now you know where it comes from.

The second issue was one that was, sadly, little-discussed. Safaricom’s Bob Collymore raised it in a panel he sat on with Christine Lagarde, the Managing Director of the IMF, the Mozambican and Ivorian Prime Ministers, and Winnie Byanyima, the Ugandan diplomat who now heads up OXFAM. Collymore raised the issue of corruption in Africa, which, in his opinion, was the elephant in the room that wasn’t getting an airing out. It is true that we purport to discuss corruption at every turn in Africa. Unfortunately, though, that discussion tends to be mostly pro forma.

Collymore described it best: at most government offices, there typically is a large, self-important sign that declares that the institution is a ‘Corruption Free Zone’. It is mostly meaningless, and misleading. The fact is that corruption is far from being eliminated in government institutions, and in private ones as well. Even Collymore, who always declares in word and deed that he has no tolerance for corruption, acknowledged that the most accurate sign at Safaricom would be to declare it a ‘Corruption Light Zone’. This is not to say that it is tolerated, but an acknowledgement that rooting it out is an ongoing, almost never-ending exercise.

Add to this the fact that many anti-corruption drives make little effort to distinguish between petty graft and the kind that will kill you. If you’re 20 kph above the speed limit trying not to miss your flight, and offer a cop 500 bob to let you go, it is not the same as the city engineer who accepts an envelope of cash to overlook building codes, which mean that down the road the edifice will collapse and take lives with it. I’m not advocating a sliding moral scale, but a little degree of realism needs to be injected into the proceedings.

The third one came from a gentleman named Andrew Rugasira. Rugasira is a tall Ugandan who runs a company named ‘Good African Coffee’ (three guesses as to what his business is about). He startled the audience (especially his co-panelists, who included Central Bank Governor Njuguna Ndung’u, acting Nigerian Central Bank Governor Sarah Alade, and Olivier Blanchard, the Chief Economist at the IMF) by stating that Africa needed to get away from the conversation about Public Private Partnerships (which is the new buzzword in international circles, as well as ‘inclusive growth’ and ‘structural transformation’). His point – which almost everyone missed, given how defensive his co-panelists became – was that African policymakers flit from one flavour of the month to another.

Where advanced economies simply buckle down and do what’s necessary, in Africa we have to discuss an issue ad infinitum, at endless conferences before we half-heartedly implement it. It is a serious point, which helps to explain why Africa remains in dire straits despite the best ideas and best efforts thrown at it. I know it is ironic to state that (especially given that I’m writing this at 36,000 feet on the way back into Nairobi from a conference in Maputo), but what Africa may need is a lot fewer meetings, and a lot more rolled up sleeves.

I’m not (yet) as cynical as I sound, especially because in these conferences, one gets to interact with Africa’s key decisionmakers, but I’ll leave you with another of Rugasira’s sobering thoughts: last year, Germany exported more coffee than the whole of Africa. Germany does not have a single coffee farm.