OVERVIEW
MANAGEMENT
PERFORMANCE
POSSIBILITIES
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ACTIVITIES
ACTORS
BURGESS
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MALI
DANGEROUS ROADS Video ... World’s Most Dangerous Roads | Mali | Free Documentary Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzC1VCYLPl8 Burgess COMMENTARY In the late 1980s I did some work for the World Bank in Mali. The personal computer was starting to be a tool for management information processing, and I was an early adopter in this space having cut my teeth working with an IBM 1401 mainframe in the late 1960s. My task has two components: (1) to find out why the 'Office du Niger (OdN)', a large government entity was failing to report back to the World Bank and (2) to assess their progress in management computerization. Among other things, I learned very quickly that the World Bank was not very good at listening to what it did not want to hear ... a problem that most of the international development assistance industry also suffered from. Local issues are important, but not usually particularly well understood by the project overseers in London or Paris or Washington. It turned out that the CEO of the OdN was a prominent member of one tribe and the CFO / Chief Accountant / Administration Officer was a prominent member of another tribe. While this may be ignored in the capital cities of the world, it does not get ignored in the day to day activities in country. My job was to work with the CFO and the first things I discovered was that he was not 'incompetent' as Washington had lead me to believe, but in fact was very competent and had had a top job at Electicite de France (EDF) prior to coming back to Mali to take on his current job. The OdN is perhaps the most important economic driver in Mali, established by the French in colonial times and critical to agricultural operations in much of the country. Though it got more international funding than perhaps any other organization in Mali, the aid came from different donors all with different agendas. The CEO and the CFO were not only from different tribes, but also from different management philosophies ... one somewhat tradition and one much more modern and data based. Getting these two senior managers on the same page was a challenge ... but not impossible. In the middle of this assignment, I got word that my father had passed away in the UK. The message came by telephone ... to the one telephone in the community (Segou) which was in the CEO's iffice. I was summoned and got the news with the CEO listening in. Immediately he understood the message he embraced the culture that exists in my experience everywhere in Africa. The death of a parent is a huge event in African life, and he took this matter seriously. He called for his #2, a senior VP of the organization, and I was escorted full time from that moment to the first available flight from Mali back to the UK some 48 hours later. There was no way that this OdN management team was going to be found wanting during such an important time in my life. I should also add that getting on a flight not long before Christmas would have been impossible except that the OdN management team pulled strings to get me on the flight. A few years later I was in Mali again, and went to Segou. The OdN was celebrating some milestone, and a lot of foreign dignitaries were in town. To my aurprise, I was invited to join the festivities and found myself sitting next to a high level development official from Europe. He was very unhappy wirh me ... and accused me of making development more difficult because of my critique of what has been happening over and over again ... month spent and little result !!!!!!! It was a little bit uncomfortable ... but the idea that I must be right because I am European ... or American ... is a foundational problem that has plagued the development community for a very long time !!!!!! Peter Burgess | ||
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World’s Most Dangerous Roads | Mali | Free Documentary
Nov 7, 2021 Free Documentary 3.63M subscribers ... 2,732,686 views World’s Most Dangerous Roads | The Hot Routes of Mali (2010) The air wants to flee the heat, but is too weak. It hovers just above the ground, heavy and weighed down by the oven-like heat. It turns wanly around itself, and tries to cool off by liquefying itself. It vibrates, it oscillates – but there is no escape. This is West Africa in late March. The Harmattan, the hot desert wind of the Sahara, is blowing without respite. It has no pity with the people who live here. Whoever wants to go from one place to another has to travel on roads that hardly deserve this name. They are dusty paths that don’t appear on any map. They are maneuverable only with great effort and for a few months of the year. They are impassable during the rainy season, since they are washed over by the Niger River, one of the mightiest rivers in the world. When it starts to rain, the roads turn into muddy paths. Every journey is a trip into uncertainty.
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