“No, man, it’s not L.A. …”

Famous last words.

I was car-jacked by proxy last week. Now, most of you probably know I can’t drive, and in fact, cannot be trusted on anything faster than a bicycle, so you will have sussed that I have a driver. Cantona, so-called for his passion for United, was driving after dark (at 7:45pm) on his way to the orphanage run by the Sisters of Mother Theresa, from where I’d asked him to take one of the Sisters on an errand she needed to run, while I stayed at home working. This is a journey he makes very often as night, as sometimes when we finish late, he takes the car back to the orphanage and parks there. But this time, as he was on one particularly quiet stretch, he noticed some people lying on the road. Naturally, he hit the brakes to avoid running over them, at which point a further 3 people came and barricaded the car in using large stones. They forced their way into the car and attacked him, leaving him with some nasty bruises and a deep scar across his neck. He’s lucky; these carjackers don’t always leave witnesses.

Having been relieved of his shoes, phone and, bizarrely, tie, he ran the distance to my house, from where we called the police and an ambulance. Even the policeman realised that Cantona had nothing to do with it, though he still gave him a pretty vigorous interrogation. I’d call the cop Columbo if I thought his image of incompetence had been a clever disguise, but no such luck – just more incompetence underneath; and under that, probably a burning core of stupidity.

In any case, Cantona’s recovering, though still very shaken, which is the important thing. The car won’t be recovered, and the insurance company have kindly told me to go stuff myself, as my policy didn’t cover carjackings. The upshot is I’m looking for a new car, and accelerating my own driving lessons at the same time.

The whole thing is, as my colleague described it, ‘a total fucker’.

(btw – those of you who know my family – please don’t mention this whole episode. They’d worry themselves to death, even though this is a very rare occurrence here, and we can avoid that road in the future. They think the car was stolen from a carpark, so lets keep it that way, eh?)

* * *

Fortunately, work continues to make up for such bad luck. I’ve spent the week preparing for the arrival of the latest IMF Mission to Malawi. Honestly, you’d think it was the Second Coming the way we’re preparing. I don’t understand what they’re going to do with these reams of statistics they’ve demanded. The whole Ministry seems to have ground to a halt as we’re scrabbling to put together all of these figures.

In any case, I’ll be glad to see the back of them. While they do keep us on our macroeconomic toes, their stringency is a bit obscene, and they could really do with a broader focus than they currently have.

Besides, in the next couple of weeks I’ve got to try and motivate our Budget Director to get our donor funded projects into the coming budget. If they’re excluded they won’t be able to access Government funding, which most need in addition to the donor's money, and the donors will be very reluctant to spend so long providing us with information in the future if we don’t actually do anything with it. It’s going to be a battle, but I’m looking forward to it more than I’m looking forward to haggling over cars…

* * *

And, finally, did you see Ballack’s goal against Milan?! What a shot. We should sign the guy up right now – he’s free!

“I been away a long time...”

Many apologies for the lack of a Ramble last week, but my internet connection failed completely. I’ve only just been able to get back online, and even now it’s constantly failing. I’m not certain I’ve definitively fixed the bloody thing, so we may get further unexplained silences. All I can say is pepani. I know the Ramble is the highlight of your week...

The timing couldn’t have been worse, either, because these last couple of weeks have been massively eventful, so this is, I’m afraid, a bumper edition of the Ramble. Clear the next fifteen minutes, because these last two weeks have been the most interesting of my time here.

Let’s start with what would have been last week’s Ramble. One of the major international donor organisations recently paid a visit to our offices, and made a very interesting proposition: how would we feel if they used their technical experts and funding to help smooth the operation of our many stalling projects here in Malawi? Avid readers will recall that my team recently carried out a similar exercise, running frantically from project to project, troubleshooting and trying to get unlock the foreign exchange we so desperately need in our Reserve Bank. The exercise met with mixed results. We managed to liberate a significant amount of money, but an equal amount remained tied up, due to problems that were either beyond our control or would take longer than the lifespan of our project, time limited by our need to meet IMF targets. What our new friends were suggesting was a nine-month exercise to comprehensively solve the problems of a wide selection of our projects.

You’d think it was a no-brainer, right? While I believe it’s a great deal for us, there’s a bit more to it than that. We’re very aware that we have systematic failings in the way projects are initiated and managed. Precisely because we’ve recognised this we’re no longer really interested in the quick fixes, short term target-meeting exercises apart (as an aside – this really does demonstrate the perverse incentives of a strict target system. It’s only now that we’ve given up on the Q3 target that we’re actually addressing the long term, underlying problems). A nine-month programme of action to help us on a failing project by failing project basis will help those projects deliver benefits to poor Malawians, but it won’t help us prevent the same problems cropping up time and time again.

We need to overhaul our system of planning, co-ordinating and governing projects from start to finish, and that is something we would love to have concerted donor support for. In other words, instead of having experts and extra money troubleshooting smaller problems like the failure to open a bank account, we need the same experts to help us put in place a system that will prevent these problems arising in the first place. And that system needs to be built into the Government machinery, so that when the donor experts leave, as they inevitably must, the system doesn’t wither away. We raised all of these issues in our meeting with senior figures from the donor agency, who were sympathetic to our reasoning. It remains to be seen whether or not we can come up with an appropriate extension to the project, because it its short term or nothing, we’ll take short-term. It will make some impact on a very poor population, and that can’t be a bad thing.

A particularly cynical question was also asked by one of my colleagues at the meeting. If this organisation is going to provide manpower and money to us as a grant, and a grant used to solve problems on projects run by other donors, well, what’s in it for you? Pretending altruism doesn’t exist (I’ve got to behave like an economist sometimes, don’t I?), there’s a simple answer. The organisation has a salary allowance and a budget set from their HQ’s central budget. If they can’t find a way to spend it this fiscal year, then their budget for the next fiscal year will be slashed. So, if they can’t get any new projects started quickly enough, they can instead throw money at other projects to get rid of it. Is this such a bad thing? As long as the projects go through Government and are vetted appropriately, then the money can probably be used wisely. But if the projects go through NGOs, many of whom are just competing to get their name known, and will slap it on any initiative, then we could start running into problems.

* * *

If you’re still reading, we now come to the really interesting stuff.

Any of you who have read more than one post here will know that I’m constantly moaning about the need for a comprehensive, start-to-finish system of managing projects. This will allow us to co-ordinate projects, weed out the unrealistic ones and rationalise our approach to managing them, while simultaneously demonstrating to donors that we’re responsible with aid money and they can therefore move away from project-specific funding to non-tied aid, which is money that is just handed in lump sum to the Treasury to use however we like.

Well, earlier this week I finally put all of this down onto paper for our Director. I made a number of strong criticisms of the way we’re working now, which I knew she agreed with, and then laid out a broad action plan for changing these working practices, starting with data collection and ending with a radical revision of the way individual units in the Division operate.

She read the paper over lunch, and then called a meeting of all of our senior officers at 3:00pm, inviting me to present this paper to my colleagues. Before I started to speak, she silenced the room and said: “I’d like you to pay close attention to this, because this paper is going to form the basis of how we will reform the way this division is structured and operates”. I nearly danced with joy right then. I presented the paper, doing my best not to make the criticisms too personal, and we agreed that we would all make comments on it, adding further issues that we need to resolve and other ideas on what else we could do to reform. After collecting these comments, I’ve been tasked with producing a manual on how we should be operating as a division, looking at every unit and making specific recommendations. This, with the Assistance Strategy we are looking to draft in the near future, will be the backbone of our Debt and Aid Policy. It could change the way millions of dollars of aid money is handled.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a more satisfying week in my working life (no offence to those of you I used to work with!)

* * *

I’m about to wrap up; don’t worry. I just wanted to mention that I had my first brush with illiberal and ham fisted policing since I arrived here. Last week, the Old Town in Lilongwe was the site of running battles between the police and the vendors who sell everything from tomatoes to umbrellas outside the various shops selling the same goods at inflated prices. The Government want them to move into a specified market area, but the vendors are aware that this will lower their revenues by taking them further away from the rich azungu. Noting their reluctance, the police and army started to attack them. As far as I’m aware, there were no fatalities, but I hear that a number of vendors were shot in the legs. One poor chap was pictured on the front of the Nation newspaper with a heavily bandaged posterior, in which a particularly sadistic policeman had delivered a round of his pistol.

As usual in the region, nothing will be done to question why such extreme measures were taken. I wish I was angrier about it, but speaking to my friends from Zambia, I’m just pleased that the police here are better than those in neighbouring countries.

* * *

Hope you all had a good St. Valentine’s Day. Mine was spent eating a dodgy pizza by myself in my garden, but thankfully, the whole thing is less of a big deal here than it is in the UK.

Tsalani bwino.

Cat scratch fever…

My attempts to keep busy at work have borne more fruit more quickly than envisaged this time last week. The upshot is, this has been the busiest week I’ve had since coming here, and I’ve been trying to find enough hours in the day to finish my work, get to my Chichewa lessons (dzulo madzulo, ndinali ndi phunziro, koma ndinali wopepera chufukwa ndinayiwala bukhu langa), unpack my belongings and get my house in order and still get enough sleep to be in the office by 7:15. So apologies in advance for the brevity of this week’s Ramble.

Anyway, I’ve been writing a paper on how we can move towards a system of what my Assistant Director likes to call ‘Institutional Debt and Aid Management’. This paper will be circulated for comments and will hopefully be a forerunner to the Debt and Aid policy I dream of getting signed up by the Cabinet. A good policy, well implemented would transform the way the country currently plans its development. More honestly, it would mean that we finally actually try and plan development meaningfully. All of our Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers and think-pieces aren’t worth much when we don’t know what we’re currently doing. How can we prioritise future spending between sectors without knowing how much activity is being undertaken in each one at present? The creation of a signing-to-closing system of monitoring projects and allocating them between sectors is vital for the country, given how much aid we receive. It needs to be co-ordinated.

I realise that this is more than a couple of years work. It’s something that will move slowly and needs someone to push it every step of the way, and to make sure that it gets implemented, and doesn’t just sit on a shelf catching dust. That person needs to be far more senior than me (and needs to be a Malawian civil servant), but the way things are going, if work continues to be this interesting and my bosses don’t change too much, I’m very seriously considering extending my stay for a year or two to try and help see all of this through. If our Director doesn’t move on, I’ll at least have one sympathetic and senior colleague eager to push the work forward.

* * *

I’ve inherited a cat with my house; her name is Banjo. Those of you who met my previous pet, a violent terrier with a Napoleon complex, will know that I’m not really a pet loving person. That said, in less than a week Banjo has actually grown on me enormously. The only thing that irritates me is that she constantly tries to jump on to me when I’m sleeping. I’ve started to lock her out of my bedroom at night.

* * *

I have to ask, though – did anyone see Duncan Disorderly punch Paul Scharner in the Everton v. Wigan bout? Someone told me it was a punch Floyd Mayweather would have been proud of. I’m gutted to have missed it. I wish Dunc would pick one someone like Papa Bouba Diop and get his just deserts. Diop would roll him up like a pair of socks.