5 things I learned working in an East African government.

A report from the front lines of economic policymaking

For the last two years I’ve been taking part in a fellowship scheme, working within the finance ministry of an east African government. You can probably guess which country I was in, and which fellowship I was doing, but let’s keep some of the mystery alive. Though I was placed by a British organisation, my contract was with the local government. I was a fully-fledged civil servant of my host country, and I had the business cards to prove it.

I’ve just finished my posting. Here’s what I learned about how government works in this part of the world, as an outsider on the inside.  

1. The lazy, absent African bureaucrat is a myth.

First, let’s dispel some unhelpful myths about African bureaucrats. Most of my colleagues were highly committed to their jobs. Some were extremely hard-working, others less so. But the average was probably a little above what I’ve seen in European workplaces.

Yes, different attitudes to timekeeping were frustrating at first, and sometimes it really was a problem. But this usually related more to when things happened, not if they happened. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński, who was an African correspondent for various press agencies from the 1950s to the 1980s, observed that “The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it”. For Africans, however, “it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm.”¹ My colleagues found it hilarious that, every day without fail, I would trapse off to lunch at exactly 1pm, eating when my watch told me to eat. They, on the other hand, ate when they felt like eating.

And my colleagues weren’t especially absent. In fact, while I was horrified the first time I was asked to work on a Saturday, they thought nothing of it. It was common to give up evenings and weekends to monitor government programmes in remote villages. That’s because, for civil servants in these kinds of countries, a ministry job is more than just a job – it’s an identity. Personal and professional lives merge into one. The guy who sat next to me in the office managed a very high-profile government programme and so he was ‘the manager’ wherever he went. It wasn’t a skin he could shed at 5pm, it was a central part of who he was.

Personal life events were also ministry matters. If you’re getting married in the UK, you might invite a few people from work you are especially close with. But the whole department descended on my colleague’s wedding here, and the boss gave a 20-minute speech that included a detailed performance review. At another wedding, I was given a place of high honour, even though I’d only seen the groom around the office a few times and I wasn’t even sure I knew his last name. But his bride wasn’t just marrying the man, she was marrying the ministry as well.

Often I was invited to the funerals of distance relations of Ministry employees I had never even met. Colleagues would often spend their whole weekend travelling across the country to attend the burial of a workmate’s great aunt. Whenever tragedy befell someone in the office, everyone else would chip in (usually a decent share of their monthly wage) to share the burden of the hospital bill or funeral costs. Even in the department responsible for promoting the formal insurance sector, these informal mechanisms seemed to dominate.

2. Small annoyances make it harder to get big things done.

I used to joke that my job title, rather than Senior Economist, should have been Senior Printer. It often felt as though that’s what I spent most of my time doing. Getting important documents printed – including letters to people with “His Excellency” in their title – was often delayed for hours (and occasionally days) because something was wrong with all the printers. No ink, no paper, no network, the printing engineer was attending the funeral of his colleague’s great aunt.

Another regular fountain of despair was the email system – a cruel and deliberately vindictive web-based tyrant. Here is a list of my key email-related grievances that GPI colleagues have insisted on editing for tact and brevity: the server was down more than it was up; the system storage was so tiny that I had to delete an email every time I wanted to send an email; the timestamp wasn’t right even twice a day; sometimes my email wouldn’t actually be delivered but the cowardly server would wait days to admit its dereliction of duty. Did that urgent email upon which the fate of the nation depends reach its destination? Find out next week.

The system also couldn’t be used with email clients, such as Microsoft Outlook. And this meant there was no organisational calendar for arranging meetings. Scheduling a rendezvous required closing my eyes, crossing my fingers and hoping people would turn up.

Though that rant was cathartic, I am obliged to say that ministries in low-income countries (mostly) do the best they can on shoestring budgets. Unlike me, my colleagues bore these challenges with dignity and rarely complained. But they meaningfully limited our ability to get things done.

Perhaps the development community is missing an opportunity to make a real impact. In the past the GPI has written about the importance of getting the basics right, picking the low hanging fruit. Putting in place basic office infrastructure in key government ministries may not be as eye-catching as funding complex development programmes, but surely it has to come first.

3. A compelling story will beat boring evidence every time. 

One afternoon, about a year into my posting, I had the chance to give a presentation to a committee of ministry bigwigs on my proposed policy to fix something or other. I crafted 20 slides stuffed with the latest evidence, showing why my planned approach couldn’t fail.

Once I had finished, a hand shot up. The man to whom it belonged spent the next 10 minutes recounting a gripping story of his cousin’s skirmishes with something or other, the remaining committee members listening from the edge of their seats. Unfortunately for me, this compelling tale of one cousin’s struggle against adversity contradicted all the rigorous evidence I’d painstakingly pieced together. I knew immediately that I’d lost the room; a good story beats boring evidence every time. Economists will tell you that evidence-based policymaking is vital. But story-based policymaking is what really gets things moving.

This is true in every country, of course. The best politicians across the world sell their plans not with numbers but with stories. But it might be especially true here, given Africa’s oral tradition.

4. Pockets of effectiveness can achieve great things in difficult circumstances.

So-called “pockets of effectiveness” are having a moment. This is the idea that even in the most dysfunctional of governments, small teams of talented, hardworking people can still get stuff done. See Growth Teams’ work with the Rwanda Development Board as one example.

This idea really chimes with my experience. There was certainly a lot of dysfunction in the government I worked for, plenty of people with the wrong skills working on the wrong policies at the wrong times. But every now and then the right people would come together to work on the right policy at the right time. And when they did, good, meaningful work was done that pushed the country forward. The challenge for leaders is to scale this up.

5. There really isn’t enough money.

Go and read this GPI article. It’s all true – every word of it.

There you have it. Five things learned in two years. I hope my funders are happy with that. Working for an east African government is every bit as challenging and frustrating as you might expect. But it runs both ways. I’m sure my colleagues often found my methods maddening. They certainly thought my wife-less, child-less, God-less, meat-less existence was hard to comprehend.

It's been a fascinating two years, with plenty of ups and downs. I’ll miss my colleagues and I’ll miss the sense of adventure in this part of the world. But I won’t miss the email system – that thing can burn in hell.

1. The full quote is worth a read here.