The Builders

Fred Swaniker was born in Ghana and, before he was eighteen, had lived in Gambia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, carried from country to country by his mother’s work in schools. He saw the same continent governed four different ways, and drew a conclusion that has guided his life since: in a country with strong institutions a leader matters little, but in a country with weak ones a single leader can make or break the nation. In 2008 he co-founded the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, to find and train young Africans who would lead honestly, and in a talk in 2014 he argued that the generation now rising is the one that must build the continent’s prosperity and its institutions. His career is the question of this conversation lived out: whether people can be made into builders, and institutions into things that work.

Atlas

Circles can change what a community sees as normal; I grant that. But my people do not only live in circles. They live under institutions: schools, hospitals, ministries, courts, companies. And here is where my doubt returns in full force. I have met good teachers who stopped teaching, honest officials who started taking, founders who gave up and voters who sold their votes for a bag of rice. They did not begin corrupt or lazy. Something inside the institutions made them so. So unless you can tell me how an institution on my soil can be made to work, everything we have discussed stays in the village. Can it be done? And has it been done?

Africa

It has been done, repeatedly, and almost always in the same way: not by fixing a whole system at once, but by building one institution that works inside a system that does not. Researchers have a name for these: pockets of effectiveness. They are public organisations in poor countries that deliver what they promise while everything around them fails, and they have been studied across my soil and beyond. Their common features are consistent. A leader protected long enough to build. Staff recruited for competence and paid on time. A clear purpose, measured honestly. And some shield from the politics that strips other institutions bare.

Atlas

Give me one that people would recognise.

Africa

Ethiopian Airlines. It is owned by the state, in a country that has been poor for most of its modern history and has lived through famine, war and revolution. Yet for decades it has been run as a serious business, with its own training academy and maintenance base, and it has grown into the largest airline on my soil, profitable where most African carriers, and many European ones, have failed. Its existence proves something that no speech can: that an African public institution, run with discipline and protected from interference, can compete with the best in the world. One such institution does more for a people’s belief than a hundred reforms announced and abandoned.

Atlas

One airline. Explain the teacher who stopped teaching and the official who started taking. If you cannot explain them, you cannot change them.

Africa

Then take them in turn, because the mechanism is the same.

A teacher who has not been paid for three months, who stands before eighty children with no books, whose headteacher got his post through a cousin, is not a lazy teacher. He is a person whose effort has stopped producing anything he can see. When Kenya gave its teachers structured lessons, books in the children’s hands and a coach who returned month after month, the teachers taught, and the children’s reading improved by about a year’s worth in a year. The teacher had not changed. The institution around him had.

The official is the same, in reverse. An economist named Robert Klitgaard put it in a formula that every reformer on my soil should know: corruption grows where one person has a monopoly over a decision, has discretion to decide as he pleases, and faces no accountability for the result. An official who alone decides who gets a permit, with no rule binding him and no one checking, will be tempted whatever his character, and his honest colleague will be mocked for refusing. Change the three conditions, by publishing the rules, splitting the decision, and letting citizens see the outcome, and the same official behaves differently, because the institution has changed what honesty costs him.

Atlas

That sounds like you are excusing them.

Africa

I am explaining them, which is different. People are responsible for what they do; institutions are responsible for what they make easy. A people that only blames its officials will replace them with officials who behave the same way. A people that changes the conditions will get different behaviour from the same people. Both truths are needed. Neither is an excuse.

Atlas

Then the founder. You have said the keys are in African hands, but a founder needs rules that hold still, courts that work and money she can borrow. What is she supposed to do while the institutions are being built?

Africa

What founders on my soil have always done: build the institution she needs, in miniature, around her own business. She cannot fix the courts, but she can build a reputation that makes contracts unnecessary. She cannot fix the banks, but she can join a savings circle whose members lend to each other on trust. She cannot fix the ministry, but she can join with other founders so that the ministry has to deal with a hundred voices instead of one. Every working institution on my soil began as a group of people who decided to behave, together, as if the institution already existed. And she can refuse to wait. Aliko Dangote, who built the continent’s largest cement company, its largest fertiliser plant and its largest refinery, put it plainly in Kigali: if Africans wait for foreigners to come and do it, the development of Africa is not going to happen; Africans must risk their own resources and lead, and then others who believe in Africa will come to help.

Atlas

And the voter. The one who sells his vote for rice.

Africa

He has not sold his vote. He has sold his belief that the vote was worth more than the rice. A person who believes that nothing will change after the election, whoever wins, is behaving rationally when he takes what he can get before it. Give him evidence that votes change outcomes, and the price of his vote rises beyond any bag of rice. We saw earlier that most of my people want their officials to listen and believe that few do. They have not stopped caring. They have stopped expecting. That is the same disease we began with, and it has the same cure: proof.

Atlas

So the builder is not a special kind of person. The teacher, the official, the founder and the voter all become builders when the conditions around them reward building instead of surviving. Is that what you are telling me?

Africa

Yes. And one more thing, because it is the one that is forgotten. Builders need each other. One honest official in a corrupt ministry is a martyr. Ten honest officials who protect each other are a pocket of effectiveness. One teacher who teaches well in a school that does not is a saint. A school full of them is an institution. The movement we are describing does not ask people to be heroes alone. It asks them to find the others.

Atlas

Then we have the whole shape of it. A person rises by protecting what is already alive. A people rises when circles make hidden belief visible. Institutions rise when builders find each other and change what honesty costs. What I still do not have is the picture at the end. If all of this happened, what would this continent look like?

Africa

Then let us look at it. Not as a dream, but as something that can be counted.