Prime
Lessons for Africa from an Indian boss
Raymond Mugisha
In my life, I have taken a number of corners. Some I have taken with braking, screeching, pain and bruising. Others have offered the reverse experience of rolling, celebration and healing. One such turn, in the latter category, I took just after I hit the age of 30. I started a job with an Indian Company, reporting to its Chief Executive. Mzee Mahendra Singh Rawat was an accomplished academic and finance expert. He was as well a very calm and patient man. In terms of age, he was fit to be my father. He treated me as one, and as such I diligently inclined my ear to his lessons while we worked. The time I worked under him counts towards my schooling, in practical terms. I had just taken a career switch and often my reports and suggestions to him culminated in teacher-student sessions, which still influence my career actions and decisions to great extent. Had he been a bad instructor, my career might have been doomed.
One of the lessons that have stuck with me from engagement with him is one that appears obvious but yet it enslaves many. Do not seek perfection as a necessity to start implementing tasks and projects but rather have the basics covered, commence work and continually address challenges along the way as they emerge. Rectifying defects and flaws is for those who are busy getting things done. Those who hope to address all problems, real and anticipated, before they get the plough running will never get any fields ploughed. Taking care to clear the path ahead of taking any first steps to move appears impressive but it rarely gives good results. For business managers, it results in issues such as late-to-market challenges. In our personal lives, it can cause stagnation. Perfectionists fear being unable to accomplish tasks perfectly and tend to postpone them as long as possible. They procrastinate. Procrastination prevents people from reaching their objectives and goals.
Regarding running corporations or indeed countries, insisting on perfection as a necessity for commencement of projects and tasks is the bedrock of bureaucratic practices. It can be highly wasteful. As such, all projects with a foundation of goodwill and good intentions should never be constrained by requirements of attaining perfection in preparations before they can commence. They should start, and incorporate the addressing of lapses as part of the implementation phase. For the time I worked with my Indian friends in the said organization above, I noticed that it was an unwritten principle most of them shared. The ideal never clouds the real from their view and their action.
As an ardent follower of the agenda of Africa’s progressive integration efforts, the above lesson on perfectionism keeps coming to mind. A number of commentators have sometimes pegged Africa’s potential to integrate and therefore economically advance, to perfecting the socio-political outlook in our different states, as a precondition.
An old paper that I read a while back, for example, highlighted challenges to Africa’s integration in a manner that should provoke thought. I will pick out a number of the issues raised. The paper states in part that “Africa’s regional integration project as well as its slow and tortuous integration into the global economy is an integration of incomplete states”. Against this, it highlights that African countries remained largely internally unintegrated in the post-colonial period and that they were not states in the true sense of statehood. It further points out that this underscores the futility of attempting continental integration on the basis of weak national foundations. The paper takes note that states that cannot fully lay a claim to complete nationhood and suffer from internal insecurities are bound to be challenged on the agenda of integration.
Such a line of thought disregards that African states were not created against any strategic forethought – at least none that benefits the states themselves, in their post-independence endeavors. To now expect these states to mature to impressive levels is in disregard to this fact. We might as well wait a hundred years from the publication of the above paper, fourteen years ago. Integrating is itself what is needed to correct a historical wrong than seeking to realize an ideal situation from a faulty partitioning of Africa.
The same paper clarifies that “without credible governance supported by regular, free and fair elections, and the rule of law, it is difficult to build confidence for economic growth”. Indirectly therefore, it prescribes that at least a significant majority of African nations must fit a certain governance code, characterized by the above attributes. The paper goes on to say that “there must be a convergence of democratisation and the promotion of human rights as cardinal principles underpinning integration”.
What the above does, in principle, is recommending the pursuit of political perfection in individual African states, as a necessary aid to continental integration. It implies that we are advised to attain ideal levels of quality in governance before we may seek to be one. We are expected to first be perfect before becoming one. This mindset complicates an already difficult task ahead of us as Africans. We have been at it for about sixty years now, and we do not boast of a good report yet. Rather we must integrate to realize the ideal situation; the state of affairs that we all desire to see.
Raymond is a Chartered Risk Analyst and risk management consultant
