South Sudan: Management deficit is affecting service delivery across most sectors of economy
By John A. Akec
December 20, 2010 — Good fighters? Yes. Good managers? No. Excellent work culture? No. These questions and the accompanying answers are what generally characterise the running of every institution in South Sudan these days, irrespective of whether or not the institutions concerned are public or private. There may be exceptions to the rule, though very rare and far between, and apply mostly to foreign owned businesses and international non-governmental organisations. For example, the GOSS ministry of internal affairs under Gier Chuang, has delivered impressive results in form of organisation, training, and equipping the police forces in Juba. This could also be said about the GOSS ministry of transport under Anthony Makana, and Ministry of Public Services under Awut Deng Achuil. That is not to say these are the only performing GOSS ministries because there may be many others whose performances may be hard to quantify because of nature of their mission.
Generally speaking, everywhere I go, I see countless ways in which things could be improved, and more often than not, they have not been. Examples include airports that charge customers service fees and yet have been unable to provide or maintain decent customers’ washrooms nor introduced noticeable service improvements over the last five years; state capitals whose citizens and visitors continue to live and walk amongst the rubbish, year after year after year, despite the fact that setting up a sustainable and self-financing waste collection system for a city is straight forward; hotels that charge premium sums for VIP rooms which are poorly maintained and not carefully looked after to ensure usability and cleanliness; many ministries in the government of South Sudan that have been unable to deliver visible results pertaining to their mission and mandate; departmental units within ministries whose heads/directors continue to operate like generals without troops, namely ineffective and failing to produce visible outputs to stakeholders since taking up their roles.
Recently I watched an entrepreneur striving to deliver high demand services single-handedly. This entrepreneur runs a lucrative money transfer business in Sudan. His clients deposit money in one end and have them drawn by beneficiaries at the other end across the country. The service involves registering details of each client (name, phone number, and city or location of residence) for the incoming transfers and outgoing transfer, as well as answering the enquiries from customers wanting to catch their remittances and paying them accordingly. First time I visited the place, I saw two employees toiling away to serve a long queue of clients in their little office in Khartoum downtown.
In my most recent visit, I witnessed only one person was handling all the tasks simultaneously. The outcome was a congested office full of queues of disaffected customers. Many of those intending to transfer money had to give up and leave to attend to other matters. This clearly presents a lost income for the company concerned. I gave the entrepreneur one or two suggestions on how to speed up the process that would involve employing 3 additional persons: one to receive incoming calls, one to handle outgoing transfers, and one to pay out the remiitances to clients, while he himself attend to handling enquiries, and directing clients to the appropriate windows/persons. That said, I very much doubt if my proposal has been given the attention it deserves.
Management deficit and poor work culture, I reckon, are at the heart of under performance of many of our institutions and businesses. Apart from being the leaders of our departmental units, bank branches, companies, hotels, commissions, universities, ministries and states; we need to be good managers as well.
For this author, good management is the ability to set achievable goals and targets, mobilise the necessary material and human resources, and working hard to achieve them within defined time scale and budget. Every manager needs to be organiser, assessor, motivator, controller and communicator, to name but a few of indispensable traits of a successful manager.
To be organiser is to be able to design a workable system for the organisation (putting the right man and woman in the right place, clear mandate and purpose, set goals, availing of resources and support). To be an assessor is to be able to evaluate performance and identify what more needs doing. To be a motivator is to be able to make subordinates willingly carry out their allocated tasks to their best ability; to be a controller is to ensure that everyone in the department unit, organisation, commission, hotel, or ministry is working towards agreed goals within the mandate not so much to optimise their own output but the overall output of the department, organisation, commission, hotel, or ministry. To be a communicator is to let subordinates have the information they need in order to carry out tasks and to give them feedback (what they are doing well, and what needs improving).
Organisations (governmental and non-governmental) come in different sizes. Each serving a different sort of customer base or stakeholders, and hence no single type of management style or component presents a fit for all. What’s more, organisations are not markedly different from hard engineering systems such aeroplanes and automobiles in which each component has an allocated role which is vital for the overall functioning of the system. Hence, their performance can be analysed using similar tools as used to design and analyse machine systems.
Training of employees to deliver quality service is a must. That alone is not enough without the use of trained or experienced managers. There must be in place means for the management to monitor the quality of service being provided or the goods being produced (whether tangible or intangible). Sometimes this may require nothing more than the manager in charge going around the facility (such as looking into the toilets in an airport lounge, or visiting a restaurant in a hotel from time to time in order to see and taste what is being served on the menu). In a more systematic case, it may involve randomly asking customers to fill in questionnaires asking them to express opinion on service received and suggest ways of improving it.
However, training of employees does not always need to involve attending courses, but could be as mundane as spending time at different branches to allow employees to pick up best practices and skills which they can bring back to their respective home branches. For example, employees of Hotel X in Bantiu can spend time working in Hotel X branch in Juba. Companies and organisations in South Sudan can also use management consultants and professors of management at our various universities to assess the performance of organisations and re-engineer their business processes in order to raise the quality of service delivery and improve organisational profitability and efficiency. Some organisations may even strive for mark of excellence in service delivery by seeking international recognition through the attainment of ISO 9000 standard certification.
In the final analysis, management is a vital administrative and planning tool that can be learnt in class room and perfected in the field. Hence, South Sudan businesses, organisations and institutions can only continue to ignore its importance at their own peril.
Let us be reminded that there is no such thing as underdeveloped economies, but what we often mistake for underdevelopment are the ramifications of prolonged under management across wide economic sectors of economy of a particular country.
Armed with knowledge of management and with determination to put it to good use, South Sudan can escape the curse of languishing in the backwaters of underdevelopment for longer than is deemed necessary.
*John Akec is the Vice Chancellor of the University of Northern Bahr el Gahzal in Sudan. Her edits blog: www.JohnAkecSouthSudan.Blogspot.com
Machingela gai
South Sudan: Management deficit is affecting service delivery across most sectors of economy
The management you brought forth in your written article needs time to be adopted. Environment is a factor to influence someone to know what he is doing for real. But from village to another village, it is more than unreal story with a bitter ending. I mean, our leaders don not know the difference between town and a village. They just provide village services to the nation while people’s demand and expectation are too high to be fulfilled in town. No one knows the meaning of development in that hopeless situation other than the known village’s life? The only festive mood we have right now is to get Southern independence and that is it…who cares about development. That is how local people live including our politicians.
The government of South Sudan is slow by turning things around. Leaders are making success visible in the areas of their failure, which is the widening gap that will be difficult to fill up in the later time. You can’t be a commander in the army and expect that you can run education ministry because of your rank, or being a social worker and be appointed to run health ministry, which is odd to see. You can be a best person in what you know best but not in the unknown zone where your knowledge is less to function well. The so called Ministers who are serving us in the South today do have no records of good works we can trace so far to convince us of their work ethics. And also the same thing to none military leaders, they are fruits of the same tree called failure. They do assume leadership role to be like this and that but when they are in there doing their jobs, it is not that way. They act differently which produces unsatisfactory results as we are witnessing.
What I am saying is: all big sectors and the government branches must bring continuous evaluation against poor performances. This needs accountability and assurance from within the government. Accountability in what one does is not yet known to be fully recognized and that alone should go with the follow up rules to provide job efficiency. You cannot be who you are if you don’t know your strength and weakness. We have to measure our strength Vs weakness in one way or the other, doing the right thing. We truly have skillful people in military wing, but we are having none career politicians in the field of development. We don’t have job oriented leaders who facilitate duties so that people will understand the system fully. Our government should take a commanding lead in doing that. But my major fear is that from Kiir all the way down to the last person in that governing circle, no one seems be better than the other person. Their work productions already prove job inefficiency to us and it will always be upsetting Southerners no matter who takes over from within or outside that ruling circle; it will be just the same thing. Our people are too far away from where development is now. I agree with you and thank for your informative and readable article!
kinagonago
South Sudan: Management deficit is affecting service delivery across most sectors of economy
Dear Dr. Akec,
I would like to thank you for the time you have taken to observe what is going on in Sudan and South Sudan in particular and then write about it to educate those who are in charge. I find this article very interesting and very educative and it needs to be publish in the newspapers in the South Sudan so that those concern can read it.
Poor management and lack of supervision are abstacles to high productivity and slow down development.South Sudan is a mess. It will take another 50 years so that they can change gradually.
What they need is to make sure each and every department has a supervisor and all employees must document what kind of activities they did today and so. In that case, all things will be ok.
Another think, I will like to add is the way those in the office treat people. I once time visit the office and the person I met asked me’ “what do you want?” I was so that mad and I asked him that is that they way you were taught to run this office? The point is that office manners were lacking in south Sudan. “How can I help you” language is a good way to ask customers so they can explain what they want.
Finally, as a head of Northern Bahr el ghazal University, I hope to see your organization one day and I will appreciate more after i saw you practice what you preach. Keep it up.
Kina