A long time ago, in a Government far, far away…

This week’s Ramble would like to stress that he is not a Star Wars fan (particularly when referring to the spectacularly bad trilogy of the boring that was recently completed).

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Let’s get one thing out of the way first: in many developing countries, the most capable people in the civil service are praiseworthy and dedicated in a way that most people never imagine. One of the vagaries of the donor system is the way it distorts the wage structure in a poor country. Donors and NGOs pay their staff well, and its easy to understand why, when they have resources to burn and poverty is so great. There is usually a two-tiered salary structure in donor organisations, with international salaries significantly higher than the salaries on local conditions. Even these local conditions, however, tend to be more attractive than the terms on offer from the civil service. So, those well-qualified, hard-working, passionate individuals you find scattered through the civil service are not only doing their best to make the lives of other people in the country a little easier, they’re doing this when they could be earning significantly more in the private sector, or among the donor community, where many of the best qualified individuals are to be found.

You do get many people in the civil service who are stuck in their ways or who don’t realise how their work can impact on the wider population, but you also get many people who are dynamic and bent on doing what they can for the country. The problems in effecting reform that my last post touched on are often found because reform can’t be pushed by a few people – there’s a critical mass that needs to be attained, a momentum that needs to be built among the many for reform to be successful. Indeed, a few resistant people can do a lot to derail a process that many are trying to push through, so strong and charismatic leadership is probably one of the more important factors in processes of reform, one that hasn’t really been looked at in enough detail.

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I’m not going to go into that now. It merits a post of its own one day. I’ve previously mentioned, in passing, that one of the great frustrations of many of my colleagues is that not all that long ago, Malawi was considered an exemplar for our neighbours in terms of Governance and organisation of the state machinery. Now, though, we go to Tanzania, to Uganda, to Zambia to try and learn from their systems of governance. Somewhere along the way, we slipped behind. For many, this is as inexplicable as it is frustrating. It isn’t remotely uncommon to hear comments along the lines of: ‘why don’t these meetings still occur? I remember, not fifteen years ago, we had them every month, and they worked very well’.

I’m sure that a great deal of this reminiscing is simply an idealisation of a past that never really existed. But it’s so widespread that it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t have some basis in reality. If that’s the case, what caused the deterioration in our relative position? Was it the rapid improvement of our neighbours, or did we regress? Listening to my colleagues, it seems like the latter was at least as large a factor as the former, and most can’t really put a finger on why. Coordination meetings gradually died out, target monitoring was gradually abandoned, and fewer senior figures stayed in post for a prolonged period of time. I don’t have an answer for why this all happened, but it has put the wind up me. It’s made me realise that everything that I’ve been working on in the last six months is fragile unless I spend the time required to ensure that it is embedded in the way our division is working. No structures in an organisation whose membership is as transient as a civil service should depend on individuals.

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I don’t want to talk about Shevchenko. I just hope that Roman Abramovich goes broke before he can buy him.