Leadership - Some of Africa’s best practices
For a moment I thought I had strayed into one of those Internet sites where fiction —product of someone’s fertile imagination — is presented (mostly text, so far) as “news items”. One of them is a “news” items about the Pope defending sin. Anybody would be fooled.
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And I was fooled when the real thing turned up. Trending on social media is a Nigerian television programme in which the presenter eulogises one of, if not the newest, African Head of State, Tanzania’s John Magufuli. Your jaw would drop. Mine did.
Honestly I thought the station had skilfully made up the stories or that the lady presenter was a tele-comedian with a tongue in cheek.
But “picture no lie”, as we say hereabouts. There, accompanying the audio were videos backing up the claims.
Fact: On his first day in office in November 2015, Magufuli made a surprise visit to the Finance Ministry, where he castigated civil servants who were not at their desks. Other surprise visits have followed, to other government institutions.
On one such visit, to the main state hospital, Magufuli found patients sleeping on the floor – and promptly sacked the hospital chief and dissolved its governing board. Magufuli slashed the budget for a state dinner to celebrate the opening of parliament. The money saved was used to buy hospital beds.
Told that cholera had killed 74 Tanzanians, he cancelled his country’s independence day celebrations to free up funds to fight the outbreak, stating that it would be shameful to spend millions of dollars on fancy parties and military parades in a country battling cholera.
Insisting that most of what government officials travel to do can be done by embassy officials in their countries of accreditation, Magufuli has banned foreign travels for most government officials.
He reduced a bloated delegation for the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Malta from 50 to just four . At any rate, he has decreed, “All officials, except the President, Vice-President and Prime Minister, will travel Economy”.
The bullet items below sum up life in this East African nation:
• No more driving of government limousine to villages on private visits;
• No more flying first class to meetings in Europe;
• You can't send Christmas cards on the taxpayer's money.
President John Magufuli has banned all these.
Not only has he ordered that government meetings and workshops be held in government buildings rather than expensive hotels, he has also restricted the amount of refreshments allowed at official meetings to only juices and water, saying, “You can take your breakfast at home!"
He has turned up in person -- on foot -- at government ministries and demanded to know why civil servants were not at their desks. On a number of occasions, he caused the arrest of 20 officials who showed up late to a meeting.
It remains to be seen, however, if the wonder will last beyond the proverbial ‘nine days’. Tanzanians, used to corruption in high places, are skeptical. They say that reformers have come and gone. Critics are betting that Magufuli's reforming spirit will fizzle out “like an open bottle of soda in the hot African sun.” The Swahili language has a phrase for it: "Nguvu ya soda" - meaning "the power of soda."
For more best practices, let us turn to central Africa and to Rwanda’s President Paul Kagame.
Among unbelievable deeds which Rick Warren, the founder of Saddleback Church in California, noted about Kagame, in his TIME 100 Tribute , was the fact that the Rwandan President has given members of the opposition parties seats in his Cabinet.
Warren, in his tribute, noted Kagame's zero tolerance for corruption, saying: “Rwanda is one of the few countries where I've never been asked for a bribe. Any government worker caught engaging in corruption is publicly exposed and dealt with. That is a model for the entire country — and the rest of the world too.”
Since the end of the genocide that took 800,000 lives, Rwanda's economy, under Kagame, has grown an average of 6.4 per cent since 2001, Indeed, the World Bank named Rwanda its “most improved country”, a status which U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon cemented when he named Kagame co-chair of a new panel on ending world poverty.
Welcome to Ghana. You can’t believe — at least, I couldn’t believe it — what I saw at the Office of Head of Civil Service in Accra. Customer service is more honoured in the observance than in the breach. Mahatma Gandhi’s “Customer is King” admonition is not a label here: it is a way of life.
At the front desk, the lady asked and I told her I was there to make general enquiries. She informed me that I couldn’t see any officer because a staff durbar was in progress. I could not wait so she asked my name and took my phone number.
“You will be contacted,” she told me. I left, very certain that it was “one of those things”. But, no, it wasn’t. Someone did contact me less than 24 hours later!