MONROVIA – Liberia’s post-war development program – from Poverty Reduction Strategy (PRS I, II) through Pro-Poor Agenda for Prosperity and Development (PAPD) to ARREST Agenda for Inclusive Development (AAID) – has whirled painfully slowly, with a national budget stubbornly wobbling between $600 million and $800 million for nearly two decades. Development experts, both national and international, have been pondering why the difficulty to surmount the woe. And here comes a former Nigerian Agriculture Minister, the ‘Africa Optimist-in-Chief’, who catapulted African Development Bank from the capital of $93 billion to a whopping $318 billion in ten years, and he has an insightful ‘how-to’ message for incumbent Unity Party government. The Analyst reports.
The government of Liberia Tuesday launched Liberia Youth Entrepreneurship Investment Bank (YEIB), and ‘Partner-in-Chief’ of the initiative, Africa Development Bank outgoing President Dr. Akinwumi Adesina, was the keynote speaker at the well-publicized occasion attended by an expanded cabinet.
Speaking on the topic, ‘Liberia: Arise, and Shine!’ Dr. Adesina shared his rich experience and thoughts as a two 5-year term president of the Africa Development Bank where he is this September leaving behind a noble legacy on how the country’s current development agenda, AAID, could make a significant impact in the lives of Liberians.
“I would like to now share with you some of the lessons I have learnt in ten years of leadership of the African Development Bank, and from my earlier time as Minister of Agriculture of Nigeria, in your quest to achieve success with the President’s agenda on RESCUE Liberia,” he said in an oration laden with both novel ideas that grew the AfDB expeditiously and concrete impact made.
“First, vision is the compass that leads to success,” he said. “It is impossible to achieve what you have not envisioned. Vision must be compelling and must be a moral call that will wake up and inspire ordinary people to rise up, seize the moment and achieve extraordinary things.
“Before I was elected President of the African Development Bank I had a very clear vision of the kind of Africa I wanted to see and what is needed to get there with the instrumentality of the African Development Bank. I called my vision the High5s, to remind you again: Light Up and Power Africa. Feed Africa. Industrialize Africa. Integrate Africa. And Improve the quality of life of the people of Africa.”
Here is how he told his story as AfDB president for ten years:
“When I first mentioned this at the time so many people thought it was an American form of greeting. But a visionary is an architect: the one with the vision is the one who knows exactly what the building will look like. For success, and transformative impact, focus is important. What the High5s did was to allow the Bank to sharply focus so it can deliver impacts.
“So powerful is the High5 that the UNDP did an assessment of it and found that if Africa achieved the High 5s it would have achieved 90% of the Sustainable Development Goals and 90% of the Agenda 2063 of the African Union, the Africa We Want.”
Then the former Nigerian Minister of Agriculture told the ruling establishment: “Your vision with the acronym ARREST (Agriculture, Roads, Rule of Law. Education, Sanitation and Tourism) is powerful, if well implemented: These 6 areas will drive economic transformation. They will boost rural economies, ensure food security, lower the costs of transport within Liberia and regionally with its neighbors and improve regional trade. They will enhance the development of human capacity to drive innovation and a well-trained labor force. They will improve the quality of life and assure good health for a more productive population. They will support the diversification of the economy and reduce over-dependence on a narrow commodity export base.”
According to him, the High 5s of the African Development Bank are fully aligned with the ARREST agenda. You can therefore count on the African Development Bank to deploy more financing to Liberia to translate the power of this vision to concrete impacts on the lives of the people of Liberia.
“Second, demand measurable results,” he further cautioned government.
“To ensure that we can measure the results of the High5s at the African Development Bank, we had to do a complete overhaul of the organization, first, by aligning the organizational structure to the High5 agenda. We created five Vice Presidencies, each responsible for each of the High 5s. This meant we could hold people accountable for delivery.
“Also, we had to change the results and monitoring framework of the Bank to be based around the High5s, so that we can rigorously measure the impacts of the operations on the High 5s at all levels, across countries and regions. Bank-wide Key Performance Indicators were set annually. And every Vice Presidency, Director Generals, Directors down the line to all professional staff had to sign performance contracts. And because the delivery of the High5s were inter-related, for example the provision of electricity will affect agriculture, water and sanitation, health and education, we ensured that performance contracts were linked across departments and vice presidencies. Also, because our works are delivered in countries (by 44 country offices) and regions (with 5 regional offices), performance contracts had to also create joint-delivery compacts between the vice presidencies that handle the sector operations and the country and regional offices.”
Dr. Adesina The third expert advice to president Boakai was to ‘hold ministers accountable’’
He said: “Now, I am speaking as a former Minister in Nigeria. There is need to have a change of mindset about what it means to be a minister. Ministers are not small Presidents. Their primary responsibilities are to help the President succeed by designing and implementing policies and programs in their respective portfolios to deliver measurable and impactful results. The only person that has social and political capital on the line is the President. That is because Presidents are elected. Ministers are appointed. There must not be any confusion about this.
“From my experience as a Minister, I learnt that for a Minister to succeed he or she must act like a speed train: choose your destination (your end result), set the direction of travel, set your speed and never stop until you get to your destination. Ministers have no excuse for under-performance.
“I remember when I was a Minister, we were asked to set our performance indicators. I deliberately set mine so high that it scared the Minister of Planning who was collating inputs for the President. I set my Ministry’s target as producing an additional 20 million tons of food over four years. By any stroke of imagination that is extremely high and very ambitious. But as I always tell myself, people do not put you in a position of responsibility to do small things. National challenges are huge and only those that can work and deliver results at scale should be called upon to work as Ministers.
“I recall the President told me at the Cabinet meeting that he understood that I had set an extremely ambitious target and that we should reduce it to avoid risk of under-achievement of targets. I said politely to my President that he was the only one with a social and political capital on the line and that he selected me as a Minister to help him deliver success and impact at scale. But that all I needed was the President’s full support. I would hold myself accountable.
“I said to the President that if I was given the resources and the full support I needed to get my team to deliver and we do not deliver to meet the set targets, all the President had to do was simple: fire me! The whole of the Cabinet hall went silent. I had put my neck alone on the guillotine, alone!
“My decision, though risky, set the tone: I will lead my teams to succeed against all odds. And succeed we did. At the end of the four years, we produced 21 million tons of food, exceeding the very ambitious target we had set.
“So, here is my advice to Ministers: set very high targets. If your target is too realistic, you are too comfortable; you are not doing enough. Scaling over a stool is not an achievement.”
“Fourth, encourage teamwork,” the AfDB president said further, suggesting that the success of your ARREST agenda requires more than one or few departments or agencies achieving their targets.
“There are interdependencies,” he said, adding that often in government, ministers do fight for territories; each wanting to show they are better than the other.
Ministers should forget about their egos, he warned. “Work together for the delivery of impactful programs for Liberians. We deliver more when we work together, instead of each one standing in and defending their own siloed territories.”
He used parable to explain himself further: “I have a leadership approach that I call the “Baobab” principle. In African savannas you will find Baobab trees. They have huge trunks. If you want to own your own Baobab tree you can try wrapping your hands around it. Well, you simply cannot. But when you join your hands with those of several others, you can wrap collective hands around the Baobab tree.
“I applied this principle effectively at the African Development Bank. That is how we forged the development of the Mission 300 between the African Development Bank and the World Bank, to jointly connect 300 million people to electricity in Africa by 2030. That was how the African Development Bank was able to work with African governments and global partners to launch the Feed Africa Summit, which mobilized over $72 billion for transforming agriculture to achieve food sovereignty in Africa.
“Liberia’s challenges and opportunities are like Baobab trees; they require joining hands together to solve them and turn challenges into opportunities.
“There is therefore a need to have a clear plan for joint delivery across departments and agencies. Use the Baobab principle. It requires joint work planning to clearly show how proposed interventions will contribute explicitly to measurable results for the ARREST agenda. You cannot leave that to chance. If you do, at the end, it will not add up.”
He therefore recommended to President Boakai to put into place what he called an Inter-Agency Presidential Performance Awards program that will recognize and incentivize inter-agency collaboration. I do this at the African Development Bank.
Dr. Adesina continued: “In fact, the Presidential award for the High5s for joint delivery will be presented to staff at the end of August. What you need is a ONE Government approach, similar to the ONE Bank Approach that we use at the African Development Bank. You need to use your budget system to encourage and incentivize projects and programs for multi-agency cooperation. Turn cooperation into collaboration and turn collaboration into partnerships for impact. You get what you incentivize.”
The fifth point was for the UP administration to “execute via a One Government approach”, because according to him “performance contracts are not enough”.
In explaining his point, he said: “Joint delivery requires joint work planning. I introduced, for the first time ever at the Bank, an annual comprehensive joint work planning, during which joint programming was developed, as well as budget allocations were tied to joint work delivery. When I got to the Bank in 2015, I found that the whole Bank operated in silos which made institutional coherence difficult. One major reform that I embarked upon was to break down the culture of silos and create what we called a One Bank. Everyone worked together and aligned to create a common goal. I remember telling my staff that if they looked at a Mercedes Benz assembly plant, while different section produces various components, what comes out of the assembly line is one product: a Mercedes Benz.”
The One Bank Model is at the core of the success of the African Development Bank’s transformational delivery on the High5s, he said. “We also had to align our work with the priorities of the countries. Today, the High5s are the drivers of Africa’s accelerated transformation in every country across the continent,” the AfDB president added. “Work as One Government. It is simple, but powerful.”
On his sixth strategy for inclusive development, he warned: “Don’t just blow the whistle; use your yellow card or red card”.
Then he explained himself: “There is no need for rules in a soccer game if the referee never uses the yellow card or the red card. I wish to commend you, Mr. President for your decision to conduct performance appraisals for public institutions. Also significant is your decision to sanction public officers that have not complied.
“There needs to be strict enforcement of performance reviews and consequences for non-performance. Your Performance Management and Compliance System (PMCS) is critical to be able to track performance. But it is only as good as the system applies consequences management. You do not have time for Performance Improvement Plans. That is what is done in companies and institutions. That is not practicable for you in an elected office as you have a very short period (four years) to deliver impacts. You cannot spend time baby-sitting poor performers. The public is eager for results and time is not on your side.”
He further warned: “So, be firm. Reward performers. Dispense with non-performers. Where you see under-performance where a public officer, department or agency is not scoring development goals for your agenda, be like a soccer club manager: change the player and change the game plan. A stitch in time saves nine.”
Regarding his seventh suggestion, Dr. Adesina said: “Reengineer, reform and strongly support the civil service, and a reformed judiciary that is independent to safeguard the rule of law”.
The civil service is the engine of government, he noted, but said it is not always well aligned with the vision and direction of government, and it is too bureaucratic, and lack of a performance culture undermines the ability of governments to succeed.
“An effective civil service needs to have a performance culture to deliver quality services to citizens. The public must have a say in assessing, transparently, the quality of services provided by the civil service. That is why the African Development Bank developed the Public Service Delivery Indices to measure and assess how the public views the quality of services delivered by the public sector across Africa.”
He continued: “The rule of law and good governance are critical for national development, whether it is in terms of protection of human rights, property rights, and contract enforcement which is critical for attracting investments. An independent and well supported judiciary is the backbone for national development.
“As I close, let me say that Liberia’s rescue mission and new future under the ARREST agenda will depend on how it manages its vast natural resources. With its vast natural resources, Liberia has no business with being poor. It should therefore pay greater attention to how it manages its vast natural resources. Its minerals, forests, biodiversity and rich lands should be for its people. Negotiate not for the interests of others, negotiate in your own interest.”
And he concluded with these words: “Arise and shine; for thy light has come, and the glory of the Lord is risen upon thee. For behold darkness will cover the earth, and gross darkness the peoples; but the Lord will rise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee. And nations shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising.”