“I tawt I taw a puddy tat”

This week’s blog takes an ornithological theme, so if, like Snowball, you can’t tell Kingfisher from the Fisher King and have no desire to, I’d suggest you look away.

Just got back from five amazing days in Liwonde National Park, staying at Mvuu Camp - pricey, but staffed by some of the friendliest and most helpful people you could hope to meet. I could write about the trip all day, but rather than try your patience too much, I’ll restrain myself.

We got up most days at dawn to walk through the national park, ideal for birding, before going on a boat safari after breakfast. In the evening, we went on a game drive, stopping for drinks by the river, before driving back in the pitch black with our guides, Angel and Symon, pointing out the various creatures of the night. We were lucky enough to see some gorgeous animals, including a few Sable Antelope, a couple of Black Rhinos, a few enormous crocs and innumerable hippos, one of whom decided to go for a wander right outside our chalet. Having heard that they can bite a human in half, I kept a safe distance, though Snowball wasn’t so shy.

We met some really interesting people as well: a Mozambican couple working to develop trade unions in the area, a fantastically friendly and interesting American doctor seeking to improve the standard of paediatrics in Malawi, and a couple of ‘white hunter, black heart’ types – the kind who go on hunting tours. Despite this unsavoury fact, they were really good company.

But the real appeal of Liwonde is the bird watching. Both Angel and Symon were avid birders and so we managed to see an amazing array of birdlife, giving me the opportunity to bore anyone who would listen with my rather exaggerated descriptions of some of them (“It was, like, four metres long!”). My eight hundred page guide to the birds of Southern Africa rarely left my side. A much edited list of the sixty-plus species we spotted (I’d link pictures, but its been a long day):

African Fish Eagle (so many they got boring)
Tawny Eagle
Brown Snake Eagle
Gymogene
Osprey
Red-necked Falcon (in pursuit of another bird!)
Dickinson’s Kestrel
Palm-Nut Vulture (juvenile)
Pel’s Fishing Owl
Malachite Kingfisher
Woodland Kingfisher
Pied Kingfisher
Giant Kingfisher
Marabou Stork
Goliath Heron
White-Backed Night Heron
Red-billed Hornbill
Trumpeter Hornbill
Green Wood-Hoopoe
Common Scimitarbill
Burchell’s Coucal
Bohms Bee-eater
Little Bee-eater
Lilac-breasted Roller

…and on and on and on. Next visit will be to the Nyika Plateau to see the Secretarybird.

Hope I didn’t bore you too much. Next week, we'll be back with the more exciting fare of economics and the civil service.

Quick and to the Pointless

A very rapid Ramble:

Had a really, really long day. Tsiku lodapayza! Wearisome. Spent it number crunching in advance of another IMF meeting tomorrow morning, at which the new Director should be locking horns with the IMF head honcho in Malawi. Unforunately, I won't be witnessing those fireworks, as I'm off to Liwonde in the morning. Can't wait.

Anyway hope you all have a fantastic Christmas. I'll probably Ramble before New Year's eve, so will let you what's happening in the city that's always sleeping for that.

How many donors does it take to screw up a light bulb?

One week might be a long time in politics, but it’s about a minute in the civil service, so as a rule things move slowly here in the Ministry of Finance. This past week has been a welcome exception, however, and one of the projects I’ve been working on has been flying since the last Ramble.

Essentially, what we’re doing is going to the various multi-million dollar projects being funded around the country and finding out exactly what is preventing money from being released to them. Most projects are currently using between five and eighty percent of the funds donors had promised to make available to them. Eighty percent is a respectable figure, but we want to be closer to ninety, and anything under sixty is pretty much unacceptable. A lot of times the problems are on the Malawian side, often out of the control of the project teams, but something that a few senior officials could fix in no time. This is where we come in. When these problems are identified, we take a report of what the problem is and how to solve it to our Minister and Principal Secretary, who make the proverbial and literal phone calls to solve them. Voila – money in the Reserve Bank.

Some of the problems turn out to be far beyond our control, however. Often these have to do with inflexible donor practices and bureaucracy, with some donors rather more culpable than others. Just hearing about some donor practices can be infuriating, so I can’t begin to imagine how pissed off the actual project teams get. For example, one project manager explained to us how, before hiring any staff, he has to send a hard copy of the advertisement to the donor’s head office in its home country. When this is okayed, they have to send the CV’s of the candidates under consideration. After these are cleared, they can interview the candidates, minus those who have found alternative employment in the meantime. They then offer the job informally to candidate and send the proposed contract to donor HQ for clearance. This can take up to three months. If the guy/girl is still interested in the job, they can then secure his signature.

If I had heard all this three weeks ago, I’d have had an aneurysm. But last week, something changed. We got a new Director to run our division. This lady is nails. She’s risen to the top of a male-dominated world in Malawi, has a very close working relationship with our Minister, a clear idea of what she wants our division to achieve and exactly how to do it. She came in, set the agenda, set deadlines and made a point of soliciting opinions from everyone, regardless of seniority. She wants to manoeuvre Malawi to a position from where, instead of accepting any pet projects a donor wishes to fund and meekly agreeing to every condition they set, we decide what needs to be done over a multi-year period and then set about securing funding for it. We get the donors onside by irrefutably linking each strand to a Millennium Development Goal, and underpin each proposal with analysis of how it will contribute to the goals. Its ambitious, but she’s already set out the first steps we need to take before getting there, starting with building our own knowledge base and recruiting new members of our team. If she stays in post for a reasonably length of time, say four or five years, she could transform our division.

* * *

I’m in mourning for the loss of Richard Pryor. I still listen to his concert CDs regularly, and one of the things I miss most about home is my collection of his concert DVDs. It’s not possible to recreate his humour on the page, so important is hearing or seeing his astonishing mimicry, so I’ll simply recommend that you get your hands on his concert album '...is it something I said?'. The truth will make your sides split.

* * *

I’ll be in Liwonde in just over a week. I’ll try get a Ramble out before then, but if the rush at work prevents me, have a great Christmas and a fantastic new year.

“There’s nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavour out of a peanut butter sandwich…”

This week’s Ramble is attempting to type with a cat on the keyboard. It’s the second biggest challenge of the day.

The biggest was preventing myself from physically assaulting a member of the IMF mission this morning. I know the Weekly Ramble is in danger of becoming Weekly Rant, but I really need to get this off my chest. Our distinguished colleagues from the Fund seem to believe that anyone who doesn’t work for them has an understanding of the economy gleaned from the Gospel According to Peanuts. This morning I attended a meeting with my Assistant Director where the most recent IMF mission to Malawi presented the findings of their work with the Reserve Bank of Malawi. As tempted as I am to betray the official secrets act (if indeed we have one) and reveal the content of the meeting, I shall bite my tongue. Essentially, the IMF are all but demanding that we take a very controversial action designed to satisfy their free-market ethos because, as the leader of the mission told our Principal Secretary, ‘until you do this, industry in Malawi won’t be able to grow. And we don’t want that, do we?’ If I was in PS’ seat I would have slapped the beard off the condescending hyena’s face, but he settled for patiently explaining that, yes, we do want industry in Malawi to grow, but our concern right now is the fact that the vast majority of the country is still at risk of famine and diseases related to undernutrition. Taking the actions the IMF suggested would make it more expensive for these people to purchase food. And as much as industry matters, that is what we really want to avoid.

Of course the Fund doesn’t really think about all that. For them the be-all and end-all of development is the achievement of macroeconomic stability, i.e. low spending and low taxation. No matter how much you explain that, actually, you need to spend to increase agricultural and indeed industrial productivity, how you need to nurture these industries, they stubbornly refuse to budge from that basic position. When the leader of the mission left the room one of his colleagues, who only recently joined the Fund from the private sector, acknowledged that our position was a perfectly reasonable one. If I wasn’t such a cynic I’d go so far as to say he was implying that he wouldn’t take the Fund’s advice if he was in our shoes. But no. They’re not human, are they?

* * *

Lilongwe is an amazing city. Just the other night, driving home with Cantona, we saw an impala running across the road in front of Capital Hill. A more pleasant surprise than the snake in Snowball’s driveway.

* * *

I have a moral dilemma, and any advice would be muchly appreciated. I recently found out that a friend of Cantona’s (nom de blog, Hobbes, mainly because I wanted to link that page) is going be out of a job soon. He’s a fantastic guy: honest, hard-working, and endlessly good natured. He’s going to lose his job because his employer is seeking greener pastures, but told me this in the strictest confidence (yes, yes I know, I am fully aware of the irony of publishing the information on the internet). This person has begged me not to let this information out among our small circle of friends, and would never forgive me if I broke this promise (she doesn’t know about the blog. So lets keep it quiet, eh?). Unfortunately, one of the people I’ve been explicitly requested not to tell is the only person I know who can find Hobbes a new job. Hobbes comes from a really tough background, and he’s incredibly honest. He recently turned down a better paying job out of loyalty to his current employer. And to top it all off, his wife is ill.

What do I do?