I was in the bath one day, when I realised I was destined for greatness…

Another day, another headache (…and another cliché).

If there’s one thing working here will teach you, its how to be proactive. If you sit around hoping that some interesting and important work will fall into your lap, you’ll wind up twiddling your thumbs more often than not.

We had our meeting with our donors yesterday, and I as I predicted, we met with a fair bit of resistance to our proposals. It must be said that some of the objections were reasonable, most boiling down to ‘he would one day fly must first learn to stand and walk’ (and yes, that’s Nietzsche by way of Coming to America – you can’t accuse me of being highbrow). Our titular response was plagiarised from this Joker.

In seriousness, though, it is true that we’ve never had any system for capturing even annual donor inflows effectively, so our drive to monitor on a monthly basis does seem to be a bit sudden. We have our reasons, though.

Firstly, the reality of the situation we’re in is that to hit IMF targets we need to monitor what happens in the economy each month. We need to know in the middle of a financial quarter that our project grants aren’t coming in as expected so we can start to try and resolve this before we miss our quarterly target.

Secondly, we have momentum on this now. A new director, people in key posts within government who get along with each other, people in key posts in donor agencies who are capable and helpful; the fear is that if we move too slowly this favourable confluence of circumstance will dissipate.

We explained all of this to our donor group, and though they have reservations, we made a few compromises and reached broad agreement about what we can request, by when and from whom. We were all in agreement that all of this needs to be driven by the Ministry of Finance, and key decisions should rest with our Director. Hopefully a system of sorts will be running by mid February, which we can refine in the run up to the 2006/07 budget.

Which brings us to my comment about being proactive. Having helped to clear a path on this work, I suddenly realised that since this was resolved faster than I expected, I’ll soon have no active projects or assignments on. To forestall this, I spent the afternoon I made a list of all of the things the division still needs to do in the next six months, starting with the formulation of a Debt and Aid policy. I’m having a meeting with my boss tomorrow morning, after which I’ll run all of this by the Director and hopefully a couple of these projects will get of the ground soon.

* * *

The Africa Cup of Nations is starting to hot up. After yesterdays cracking 1-0 between Nigeria and Ghana, I watched the Ivory Coast beat Libya. The Ivorian team is physically imposing and technically adept, with a few players who are clearly ready for a move to major European clubs, not least Didier Zakora and Yaya Toure. What really surprised me, though, was the flair with which Libya undertook their infrequent forays forwards. I’ve not seen so many accurate backheels and flicks since Jay-Jay Okocha seared himself into my consciousness in the 1998 World Cup.

It’s also refreshing to listen to commentary that doesn’t refer to every piece of poor defending as ‘naïve’. In fact, the giants of African football, teams like the Ivory Coast, boast of defences as reliable as they come. To take just two examples, the Ivorians feature Kolo Toure and Marc Zoro of Messina and Ghana’s defence is marshalled by Sammy Kuffour, a bit past his best, but on his day still impassable.

* * *

I may not be able to Ramble next week as it might take a bit of time to get my internet connection sorted out when I move into my house. If I don’t turn up, don’t fret; I’ll be back soon after that.

Tionana.

Haggis McMutton and LeChuck

I find myself apologising for the tardy Rambles more and more as time goes on. It’s due to a combination of things: taking more work home, Chichewa lessons every other day (ngakhale ndilibe phunziro la Chichewa lero) and finally finding a decently equipped gym. A big reason, though, is that a friend returning from the UK has brought me a couple of computer games, which have gradually started to siphon off all of my free time. This is exactly why I stopped playing these childish things before I came out. Since I got here, though I thought it would be a way of passing the time on the less busy evenings…

Big mistake. The Curse of Monkey Island is now constantly running on this computer, and I find myself wondering how I can get Haggis McMutton to join my pirate crew even while I’m having lunch.

Anyway, this weekend, I’m taking a break from it all and going down south to a lodge in the tea estates in Mulanje, which should be great. I’ve been overcome with guilt at the prospect of missing two Chichewa lessons, though, and to compensate, have organised a two hour lesson on Sunday – but still, the guilt persists. I haven’t felt like this since I was student.

* * *

Things at work have been hectic. I’ve been working on a system to capture all donor aid inflow to Malawi, so I’ve spent most of this week working on how best to design this, while simultaneously coming up with ways of selling the idea to the major donors. We’re meeting next week, when I’ll be giving a presentation aimed at getting them onside. So, my break to Mulanje isn’t exactly ideally timed, but it’s a good opportunity to go, and I’ll take my files with me.

While working on this, I’ve also been using the information we do have to see how we’re performing against our PRGF targets. The main message of this frustrating exercise is that we desperately need a new system to get all this information in, as the current one has more holes in it than the Middlesborough defence (yep – even in Malawi we’re laughing at that 7-0, and the same thing happened to us last year).

Our Director has been away all week as well, with an illness, so the other work we’ve been doing, freeing up resources that are tied up in underperforming projects hasn’t been moving as fast as we’d hope. We’ve got a list of actions we’re recommending she take, but until she okays them, we can’t do anything. So here’s hoping she gets better soon.

* * *

I’ll be moving into my house next week; I just told the lodge staff. I’m going to be very sad to leave my friends behind. Maybe I can take some of them with me…

“Salvation sat and crossed herself; called the devil partner”

A really busy week; apologies for not getting this out sooner.

Post-Christmas lethargy is dissipating and momentum is gathering on my pet project, designing an ideal system for recording donor activity in Malawi that meets all our needs at the Ministry of Finance. It’s an ideal system in that it’s what we would want to have in a perfect world, a system that captures the information we need to monitor our progress against our PRGF (Poverty Reduction Growth Facility) targets set by the IMF, while also allowing us to keep an eye on every project being undertaken in the country, spotting problems as or even before they arise.

But as much as I love it, Malawi isn’t perfect. There is no way we’re going to get this best case scenario off the ground any time in the next two years. Donor’s will balk at the information requirements (though in practice they won’t have to provide much at all) and will also be wary of publicising their spending patterns. On our side, I’m not sure we have the capacity within the ministry to make sure that the system is maintained, so a less ambitious version will have to do for now. But that doesn’t mean the position paper I’ll be writing over the next couple of days is an academic exercise; with any luck it will allow us to define our position when negotiating with donors before we sit down and finalise the design of the system.

This isn’t a minor consideration. Until now we have tended to go into meetings without a clearly articulated position to use as a starting point from which to make compromises. As a result, the agenda tends to be dominated by the donors. This can be problematic for two reasons.

Firstly, no matter how well intentioned they are, donors have a different agenda to us. This is set partly by their home government(s), who invariably have pet projects and hot topics that the donor is obliged to pursue, and partly by a wider desire in the development community to see a particular type of growth. Most development economists and aid workers these days go misty-eyed when someone mentions ‘small holder agriculture’ or ‘medium-sized businesses’. Of course, none of these countries developed using either of these two forms of production or and pretty much every success story of the last 50 years has relied on either large scale enterprise like the zaibatsu in Japan and chaebol in South Korea or a politically powerful emergent capitalist class, but lets not mention that. In the current climate, a desire to grow by encouraging capitalism despite the inevitable relative inequity and consolidation of wealth that this entails is treated like a suggestion that heroin be introduced to school lunches.

Secondly, donors squabble. It’s as simple as that. Most donors have a deeply ingrained superiority complex when dealing with the host government, and as a result, most operate on the assumption that they are always right (when in fact, it’s me who is always right, don’t you know…). This attitude is carried over to their dealings with other donors in multi-lateral talks like those we’re about to start over this information system, with the result that unless we can provide an agenda and a starting point, the whole exercise could descend into an extended argument between donors over what font to draw the title page in…

* * *

The good news is: ndili ndi nymuba! I have a house. I’m moving in at the end of the month. A colleague has decided to leave Malawi early, and I’ll be taking up her vacant Ministry of Finance house. Although I’ll be very sad to leave all my friends at the lodge, I can’t wait to have my own kitchen.

Pang’ono Pang’ono

Don’t you just hate the holidays?

I got back to the office after my sojourn in Liwonde eager to get back to freeing money up to bolster our rather precarious foreign exchange reserves. To my dismay I found almost all of my colleagues away on leave, with those that remained so over-burdened with other people’s unfinished work that they couldn’t spare a second for our attempts at troubleshooting for projects in dire straits.

I do realise that my desire to work over the New Year marks me out at as incorrigible geek, as did my insistence on staying in with a friend and a couple of drinks on the eve, thus avoiding the social commotion of a party. But things were going so smoothly before my departure, I’d actually spent part of my time in Liwonde thinking up new ways of getting information from a couple of truculent projects, so imagine my dismay at the lack of progress that greeted my return... That said, things are starting to pick up again, as witnessed by the files I’ve been obliged to take home. The problem is that with our momentum dissipated, we’ve been finding it harder to find fruitful avenues of approach with some of the projects we’re working with. A number of them have problems so intractable that we cannot do anything except recommend to the PS that we never agree to the same conditions again. Others are running into problems to do with the lack of capacity within Malawi (how do you spend money earmarked for construction when there are no qualified civil engineers in your district?), things we need to change over the long term. In the meantime, we need to be more realistic about what projects we can actually institute.

While this project is ticking over slowly, I’ve been working on an audit of how we work with donors and how we need to reform our data collection practices. You can be assured that when that swings into top gear, you’ll be treated to an industrial-strength rant regarding the poor practices donors think they can get away with because we haven’t been chasing them up with the vigour we should be. That should change when we finish this review, however. I’m very tempted to name and shame a few right now, but I’ll bite my tongue till we see how they react to our requests for reformed working practices.

* * *

So, with work a little slower during the festive period, I’ve started my Chichewa lessons, having hit a wall in my attempt to learn through osmosis. My teacher, the brilliant and cheerful Keating (and yes, I hate that bloody film, too) has already improved me no end. I can already insult people pretty effectively: sindimakonda Diouf; amanyansa kwambiri (I don’t like Diouf – he’s always being a shit). More prosaically, I can now communicate relatively effectively when talking about people, though inanimate objects (requiring the memorisation of noun groups and associated rules) is a bit trickier. All in time, all in time…

In the meantime, a prize (or, rather, praise) to anyone who can translate the following:

Ndikanokhala ndi ndalama, ndikanopita ku Nyika