A Confederacy of Dunces
Much like Fox News, the Ramble likes to think it provides you with a fair and balanced view of the world. So, having given you the sad stories of competent, able, young(ish) civil servants who are working for a fraction of what they could earn elsewhere, and the massively underpaid (very) young men and women who struggle to find motivation to complete work, I now present the flip side.
* * *
A recent late night discussion with one of my friends turned, inevitably, to work (we’re an exciting bunch), and in particular to some of our more frustrating colleagues. The labour market in Malawi is a peculiar animal. Many of the very best professionals from the country have emigrated in search of a better life, something particularly problematic in the health sector, and not just in Malawi, as anyone who has been treated in an NHS hospital can attest
Alongside this exodus of the medically trained, there has been a smaller outflow of men and women particularly suited to the multi-tasking, semi-specialised life that is a civil servant’s lot. Correspondingly, there is a smaller pool of highly qualified, competent individuals in the civil service than would otherwise be the case, leaving key posts unfilled at most Ministries. At the same time, Malawi has a surfeit of donor agencies with large budgets, who sometimes struggle to spend all the money they’ve been allocated in a financial year.
Among the remaining potential civil servants, there is a class of individuals who have taken advantage of the combination of their scarcity value and the existence of cash-rich donor agencies by excluding themselves from Government labour searches and instead declaring themselves ‘consultants’. They win lucrative contracts, paid for by donors, and work on basic development projects: reports, strategies, think pieces, commissioned either by the donor themselves or by a Government ministry. The real problem, however, isn’t that this segment of the labour market exists. If the consultants are of a high enough quality and produce useful outputs, then they are well worth it. In fact, I’ve worked very closely with one such consultant, and I can say with all honesty that this individual has completely transformed one major part of our Ministry, and all for the better.
No, the problem is that so many of these consultants are actually rather mediocre – and donors continue to pay exorbitant sums for mediocre outputs from them. Even worse, many of our crucial development strategies and plans are being produced by these consultants, to the extent that the Ministries themselves never build the capacity to write and implement such documents, even though the best people within each Ministry are more than capable of doing so. Since donors are funding consultants to produce them, Government tends not to use its scarce personnel to do the work in-house. As a result, a kind of consultancy-dependence develops in Government. If we don’t have the consultants, we’re unable to write our strategies or carry out our major projects with efficiency; but if we continue to use them, we won’t be developing the ability to do any of this work internally.
The friend with whom I was discussing this had a rather nifty analogy for this, involving Angkor Wat, trees and a Catch-22 to end all Catch-22s. I was planning on plagiarising and mangling this analogy for my readers, but fortunately I can’t quite remember the details that made it so apt.
* * *
A quick rant: the budget is looking like it won’t be passed in a timely manner after all. Parliament is blocking it until MPs are granted an enormous pay rise, to go with the increased allowances they have already been given. Rightly, the Government is refusing to cave in. It’s incredibly frustrating that in a country with such deep poverty, so many of the elected representatives treat their positions as a private source of income rather than a means to develop their country. These budget problems have caused the Ministry to slow to a crawling pace – also frustrating when we’re trying to finalise our strategy for interacting with donors.
* * *
A recent late night discussion with one of my friends turned, inevitably, to work (we’re an exciting bunch), and in particular to some of our more frustrating colleagues. The labour market in Malawi is a peculiar animal. Many of the very best professionals from the country have emigrated in search of a better life, something particularly problematic in the health sector, and not just in Malawi, as anyone who has been treated in an NHS hospital can attest
Alongside this exodus of the medically trained, there has been a smaller outflow of men and women particularly suited to the multi-tasking, semi-specialised life that is a civil servant’s lot. Correspondingly, there is a smaller pool of highly qualified, competent individuals in the civil service than would otherwise be the case, leaving key posts unfilled at most Ministries. At the same time, Malawi has a surfeit of donor agencies with large budgets, who sometimes struggle to spend all the money they’ve been allocated in a financial year.
Among the remaining potential civil servants, there is a class of individuals who have taken advantage of the combination of their scarcity value and the existence of cash-rich donor agencies by excluding themselves from Government labour searches and instead declaring themselves ‘consultants’. They win lucrative contracts, paid for by donors, and work on basic development projects: reports, strategies, think pieces, commissioned either by the donor themselves or by a Government ministry. The real problem, however, isn’t that this segment of the labour market exists. If the consultants are of a high enough quality and produce useful outputs, then they are well worth it. In fact, I’ve worked very closely with one such consultant, and I can say with all honesty that this individual has completely transformed one major part of our Ministry, and all for the better.
No, the problem is that so many of these consultants are actually rather mediocre – and donors continue to pay exorbitant sums for mediocre outputs from them. Even worse, many of our crucial development strategies and plans are being produced by these consultants, to the extent that the Ministries themselves never build the capacity to write and implement such documents, even though the best people within each Ministry are more than capable of doing so. Since donors are funding consultants to produce them, Government tends not to use its scarce personnel to do the work in-house. As a result, a kind of consultancy-dependence develops in Government. If we don’t have the consultants, we’re unable to write our strategies or carry out our major projects with efficiency; but if we continue to use them, we won’t be developing the ability to do any of this work internally.
The friend with whom I was discussing this had a rather nifty analogy for this, involving Angkor Wat, trees and a Catch-22 to end all Catch-22s. I was planning on plagiarising and mangling this analogy for my readers, but fortunately I can’t quite remember the details that made it so apt.
* * *
A quick rant: the budget is looking like it won’t be passed in a timely manner after all. Parliament is blocking it until MPs are granted an enormous pay rise, to go with the increased allowances they have already been given. Rightly, the Government is refusing to cave in. It’s incredibly frustrating that in a country with such deep poverty, so many of the elected representatives treat their positions as a private source of income rather than a means to develop their country. These budget problems have caused the Ministry to slow to a crawling pace – also frustrating when we’re trying to finalise our strategy for interacting with donors.
posted by the Maradona of Malawi at 9:45 PM
