Date: 2024-11-22 Page is: DBtxt003.php L0913-TVM-MMW-000004
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TrueValueMetrics ... Peter Burgess Manuscript
Making Management Work for Relief and Development |
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Chapter 4
So Many Things are Wrong |
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Hundreds of issues
There is not just a single thing wrong. There are hundreds of things that are wrong, and have contributed to failed relief and development. (See a companion book “Hundreds of Issues that Impact Relief and Development Performance”). My first visit to Africa Before my first visit to Africa, I had learned something about it. I learned something during my education, but it was in the abstract, as education mostly is. I had learned development economics as a student, and at university I had a number of African friends. I had done some desk based project cost analysis of some World Bank projects in Africa while I was at Coopers and Lybrand, and I had followed the news on radio and in the newspapers as the countries in Africa became independent. I first traveled to the “south” in 1974, to Liberia in West Africa. I thought I was well prepared for what I would experience. But actually being in Africa was much different from what I ever expected. More than anything else I was surprised by the fact that nothing seemed to work the way it should ... that nothing seemed to be maintained ... that people seemed resigned to broken everything. It took me a while, but I got over these first impressions and eventually started to see people lived surprisingly happily in spite of so much around them being broken. I remember getting off a Pan Am flight to Liberia from New York in 1974, and immediately realizing that nothing in the airport terminal worked, at any rate in a way that someone from Europe or the United States would expect. Air conditioning? No. Cleanliness? No. Baggage handling? Yes ... but really handling, not conveyor belts that actually moved. It was the wet season. It was a downpour, and would continue raining for the next several hours before stopping for a short while only to start again soon to continue into the next day. A colleague was waiting for me. He knew it was my first time in Africa, and was enjoying my shock and first impressions. As we drove from the Robertsfield Airport to the city of Monrovia, about 50 kilometers, he explained that the road had been funded for reconstruction several times, but the work still had not been done, except for some minor maintenance. The road was awful, or so I thought. It was raining. It was dark. It was really quite scary. In 1974 Liberia was the largest “beneficiary” of US aid in Africa according to the statistics of the time. It is relatively speaking a small country, and this amount of aid should be making a big impact. But of course, what actually got spent on aid was very much different from the statistics. Liberia was a “listening post” for US intelligence, and it had a large community of US personnel attached to the US Embassy, most of whom had little or nothing to do with Liberia and its development. The various masts and aerials used by US intelligence near Monrovia were an impressive collection. Of course, with new satellite technology, these facilities are no longer needed and this component of US security was phased out and closed a long time ago. I should have made the link ... connected the dots ... between the statistics on spending, lack of development and US security considerations way back then. But it was not on my radar, and I did not give it much thought. I was visiting Africa as the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Continental Seafoods Inc. (CSF), a US based international fishing company, a subsidiary of Ward Foods which was a NYSE company. Over the next many years I would spend a lot of time in Africa, as well as South Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. As I recall, one lesson I learned very quickly was how similar and how different each of the countries were. My CSF colleagues understood local business and the local environment very well. They did an amazing job of keeping the company's operations going. They did not have it easy. It is hard to find very much in the “south” that works right. This is a terrible thing to say, but sadly true. Why is the economy so poor? Why is the government so ineffective, or worse? Why are people so ill? Why do the phones not work? Why are the roads so badly maintained? Why is there no electricity? Why? Why? Why? Connecting the dots I have seen a lot, and like to think I have learned a lot. And as I have learned I have been trying to connect the dots, and what emerges, is a dysfunctional system with some people doing very well and the vast majority losing out. Worse, as the rich get richer, it seems the poor get poorer. I am reminded of the story of a young international agricultural expert who was lecturing a group of farmers in the “south”. One of the farmers asked a question starting with “I have 30 years of experience ...”. The young expert in his reply started by saying “I need to correct you ... you have one year of experience 30 times.” I like to think that I have 30 years of learning more and more, rather than just reworking the same small amount of knowledge over and over again. I am reminded also of the observation that many people '... learn more and more about less and less, until they know everything about almost nothing! ...'.I like to think that I have been able to learn a surprising amount covering a very broad range of situations ... but that what I know is only a tiny amount of what others know. After a visit to a remote rural community where I had learned a lot from the local chief, I realized that '... if I don't know it, it does not mean that it is not known'.I am connecting the dots as best I can. There are big problems ... but later I hope you will see that there is a huge potential to have a massive improvement in performance. People Even though people in the “south” live in a failed economic environment, people are amazing and go on in spite of all sorts of trials and tribulations. People may be poor, but people are hugely valuable, especially to themselves, their families and their communities. Good people are constrained by lack of opportunity. Meaningful opportunity is hardly ever accessible for the mass of the world's poor. It is a sordid and unpleasant fact. While rich people have access to anything and everything, poor people have access to almost nothing. Many of the elite in the “south” are benefiting mightily from the prevailing systems for relief and development, and are able to use the fund flows in many different and inappropriate ways. People at the bottom of the pyramid who should be benefiting are not seeing very much of the fund flow that is discussed by leaders at the top and reported in the media. Why is the infrastructure so run down? Infrastructure lasts a long time, but it does not last for ever. Infrastructure needs maintenance, and as it gets older it needs a lot of maintenance. Throughout the “south” there has been low investment in new infrastructure, and little maintenance of the old. Public works expenditures are totally inadequate. There have been some big “projects” to build roads, for example, but the costs have often been high relative to the amount of construction completed. Many times the contractors have been either high cost international contractors or cronies of the ruling elites. In both cases the local people eventually get saddled with debt and not much decent road to show for it. Why is water such a problem? Water is so critical to life, yet it is perhaps the biggest failure in the infrastructure of the “south”. People, mainly women and girls spend hours and hours every day carrying water by head load for household needs. In the “north” we expect water, hot and cold, to be instantly available at the turn of a tap. In the “south” water is rarely safe to drink ... the “north” expects its water to be potable, totally safe and instant. Water was a strategic component of the colonial era. The rivers were definitely part of the colonial scheme of things, and there were urban investments in water systems, but nothing like universal availability. None of this has been scaled up and maintained in the manner needed in subsequent years. The investments in potable water infrastructure have mostly been small, and the results inconsequential. There have been some investments in water for irrigation, but systems have been badly managed, have become saline, allowed to deteriorate and have stopped performing. Why so much war? Why so much violence? Some of the reasons for war include:
People fight ... it is human nature. It is the way “men” show their strength. Physical prowess has been a central characteristic of society from ancient times until now, from the ancient Olympic Games to a modern Super Bowl playing American Football. Children fight on the playground. It is normal. But all this fighting and physical prowess has an ugly downside. Combined with greed in any of its forms. Physical violence can get out of hand and produce catastrophic results. Power hungry have used violence throughout the ages, and so have people seeking riches. Why should modern war be any different. War is always about protecting or increasing ownership of something someone sees as valuable. And like a game of chess, the first move is not always the most important. Bloody guns: death, refugees and IDPs The “south” is full of guns. These were not manufactured locally. They came from sources within the global munitions trade, much of which operates in the shadows but handles a lot of very real money. All the guns that do damage in the “south” come from the “north”, and the value destruction they cause is immense. One of the result of guns is dead people. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead because there are a lot of guns which facilitate deadly interaction between people who are disagreeing. A lot of people are dead because governments are better at making war than at making peace. Guns in the “south” were often delivered because of some ideology ... the cold war ... the fight against communism ... the fight against capitalism ... but never directly to help a poor family have a happier life. Refugees – war and violence is one big problem War not only kills and injures people, but also causes a huge amount of displacement. The number of refugees and displaced persons in Africa has been in the millions for the years. In the early 1980s it was recognized that there was a refugee crisis in Africa and there were two major conferences (ICARA I and II) to highlight the crisis ... but rather little follow through. The world's attention was diverted to famine, especially in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel. Over a period of about 15 years I did a series of assignments related to refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs). My work was associated with how best to handle the refugee and IDP population and provide basic services. In the course of this work I gained a lot of respect for UNHCR and many of the NGOs that worked in partnership with UNHCR. But no matter how well they do their work, the problem of refugees and IDPs is not going to be solved by better refugee services but by stopping the war and violence that creates refugees and IDPs in the first place and stops them returning to their homes. Ghastly globalization From the “north” perspective globalization has some attraction ... bigger markets, economies of scale, cheap labor, higher profits. But from the perspective of the “south”. It does not look anything like as good. Organizations like the WTO (World Trade Organization) seem intent on making sure that the rules of trade protect the rich corporate world of the “north, and do rather little to ensure that the “south” is included in a way that is reasonable and just. It is for a reason that ordinary people have disrupted WTO meetings calling for the organization to take into consideration the poor as well as the rich. Unrestrained free trade does not make for fair trade, and market solutions are not always the best solutions ... though government administration of prices is usually even worse. And the matter of intolerance Intolerance is perhaps more problematic now that in years past, and history tells us that intolerance in the past was horrendous. With instant global communication, the aberrations of intolerance are rapidly spread, and the easy access to advanced technology for terror has made intolerance very messy. Intolerance is evident in all sorts of areas: religion ... between major religions and within the religions, between races, between political groups, between tribes, between castes, between ethnic groups, intolerance of the poor ... and the list goes on. It was so much easier in the dim and distant past when we all lived in our own little enclave, and nothing from the outside ever bothered anyone ... or was it. If the crops failed, we were on our own, and starved! Making sense of this chaos Making sense out of all the things that are wrong is a difficult exercise, perhaps impossible. We should not waste too much more time on getting a definitive answer, but quickly move on and figure out what to do. Before we do that, some information that I find useful has been organized into the next five chapters. We look at results, and the prevalence of value destruction, the organization of the relief and development sector that has resulted in deadly dysfunction, people, and the disastrous decisions they make, and a little about management information that is missing in action. Hopefully there will be enough material presented so that there is some feel for the existing chaotic situation and, more important, the emergence of some ways to move forward to improve relief and development performance. |
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