“There’s nothing on the top but a bucket and a mop, and an illustrated book about birds…”

Zomba was eventful: very relaxed, but at the same time depressing and at one point profoundly terrifying.

The Zomba plateau is one of the major tourist attractions in Malawi. It’s beautiful, with an incredible view from the top, even when overcast, as you can see. The plateau itself is actually a raised forest of sorts, being covered in thick foliage, which makes it a great and unusual bird-watching site (and indeed, my first visit was the only time I’ve seen a Turaco). Unfortunately, the pace of deforestation in Zomba is absolutely mind-boggling. Without exaggeration, if you drive up to the plateau at 8:00am and then down again at 4:00pm, as we did more than once, you can actually see the difference in tree cover. There are apparently no restrictions on logging there, and with property rights unassigned, the result is deforestation at a rate that will soon wipe out the economic potential of the area, both in terms of natural resources and as a centre of tourism.

While that was depressing, terror came on the drive back to Lilongwe. We’d just stopped to buy some vegetables by the side of the road, pausing to chase off a shameless teenager trying to nick our hubcaps, when, travelling at about 80km/h (as you do in Malawi), we rounded a corner to find that a couple of inattentive children had let their cattle wander into the middle of the road. Snowball, who was driving, slammed on the brakes and spun the car around. As we skidded to the side, the car filled with the smoke of burning rubber from the tyres and my life flashed before my eyes, with highlights including Phastard Wednesday winning the Island School Six-a-Side Football Competition, lunch at Oriental Condor in Oxford and AC/DC at Wembley Arena. All this reminiscing was brought to a halt by the realisation that Snowball had actually saved us with a piece of driving worthy of Michael Schumacher. Thankful that I hadn’t eaten my last hamburger, I resolved to stop my constant teasing of her and to tone down my criticism of her taste in music. This nonsense lasted about five minutes, roughly the length of one of those mind-numbing Coldplay ballads she loves so much.

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I’m once again rambling with a time lag this week, because my internet at home conked out. This time, though, not even my phone is working. A fair proportion of Lilongwe have had their phone lines killed by some bugger who’s gone and stolen a bunch of wires from Malawi Telecom. One wonders what the black market rate for used telephone wire is…

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I’m still trying to work out how to actually ensure that people come to meetings here. I know its possible; last week I attended a meeting at which around 30-40 people from around Malawi turned up. Meanwhile, the strategy paper I’ve been working on has suffered from mixed attendances at key meetings, though we’ve tried every method of invitation delivery bar carrier pigeon. Today, I used e-mail, hard copy (hand delivered), fax and telephone invitations. I’ll let you know how it works out.

The Curious Incident of the Blog in the Night-Time

Eagle-eyed readers will notice the disappearance from my sidebar of a blog posted about three weeks ago. No need to call in Poirot: I shall reveal all now.

Recently, I installed a Statcounter on this site. This rather interesting device allowed me to see how many different people were reading my humble little masterpiece. After a few days of getting rather excited (who knew anyone in Venezuela was interested in what went on in my corner of the world?) it began to cause me more and more anxiety. Firstly, I was beginning to get jealous of the globe-trotting ways of The American Geordie. More than that, however, the facility which allowed me to see the referring link to this blog started to worry me. It became abundantly clear that just about any Google search involving the word Malawi eventually led to this blog; if you add any number of basic economic terms, then it may even come up on the first page. One specific Google search I used as a routine course of my work led to the top result being a link to the now-deleted post.

Now, none of my colleagues know of my secret life as the Maradona; even though I have taken great pains to avoid mentioning anything that could compromise the Ministry's position, I'm not too keen on any of them discovering my flagrant disregard for the Official Secrets Act. I'm not sure how they'd react, but I don't want to find out.

Fortunately, the only colleague I've singled out for criticism, Oblomov, will never find this. He uses his computer solely for the use of Spider Solitaire, I've heard, and besides, he'd never Google anything work related...

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Well, enough navel-gazing. The work week is being truncated by the Easter holiday's tomorrow. I'm going to Zomba to recharge the batteries and do a spot of bird-watching (I have also located a satellite TV on which I may be able to watch the Milan derby; be still my heart).

This week has been tiring, as we've stepped up our efforts to engage our donors in our drive to reform the way aid is managed in Malawi. We set up what would have been a large and extremely important meeting for earlier this week, but the vagaries of the post office ensured that most of our colleagues from the donor community didn't receive their invitations or the supporting materials. As a result, when we called around to confirm attendance the day before, most promised to send a representative, but these poor people had no idea what we were about to spring on them. Our guests, understandably, got rather confused as to what we were trying to do, and we spent most of our time resolving that confusion. As a result, we have to have another meeting after the Easter break to actually give them our detailed plans and ask for their support.

We're hand delivering those invitations.

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I'll try and post some photos of Zomba next week; I've worked out how to upload pictures from my phone onto the computer. If you can handle the dodgy quality, you might be interested to see what this paradise looks like.

“Governing a large state is like boiling a small fish”

If anyone can tell me where I nicked this week’s title from without recourse to Google, I shall be profoundly impressed.

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Leaving aside matters of provenance, the quote implies that the best way to take control of, or lead a large collection of people or groups is to do as little as possible to them. (As an aside, one wonders whether the author thought that the converse was true; if boiling a large state is like governing a small fish. Both must be rather complex procedures).

Now, I appreciate that this is utter nonsense, but it seems to have been taken to heart by the leaders of many organisations I’ve encountered. How else can one explain the utterly uncoordinated and chaotic manner in which so many function? I speak with direct experience of three large organisations, each of which was organised into a number of divisions and teams. Such divisions are always at least partly forced, because the actions of one division always have some impact on the activities of another. In many cases, the effective operation of the whole depends on the divisions working well together.

I’ve never been anywhere where the divisions are actively trying to harm one another, but equally, I’ve never been anywhere where they really seem to be on the same wavelength. In most cases the heads of one division honestly don’t seem to have a clue what any of their colleagues are doing, and have even less desire to find out. Of course, in every organisation there are exceptions to this rule, and this person often finds him or herself expending vast amounts of energy and time trying to motivate people to work together, often while smart-arsed observers watch from the sidelines, sniggering and making snide comments about the futility of it all.

Is it futile? It might be my Socialist tendencies, but I genuinely do believe that groups of people, motivated by a common cause and tied together by a sense of identity are far more likely to achieve positive outcomes than atomised individuals blindly following their own best interests. When the organisation in question is a Government, then this is pretty important. Each ministry and division blindly pursuing its own interests doesn’t do much for the needs of the country, and in a place like Malawi, we need to do as much as possible as fast as possible for the country. Any opportunities we have to improve things, we have to take.

In this vein, for the last three months I’ve spent hours of my time in meetings with my Director, and those of other divisions and ministries trying to get everyone on the same page, and working together. It’s hard work, but we’re beginning to see progress. Enough people are exasperated enough to forcibly pull their colleagues together. Perhaps it’s because we’re in such a difficult position as a country that people are able to decide that enough is enough in a way I’ve not seen before. It’s almost inspiring. Obviously the litmus test will be when we graduate from just having meetings to actually getting people to do work for each other, but it’s a start.

Does the private sector experience the same problems? Somehow I doubt it.

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Well, Milan did their best to give me a heart attack, but Superpippo came through. It takes a special kind of genius to achieve so much without any apparent skills.

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And, as if you needed to ask, the car is still in Mozambique.