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Lessons from Budapest on why Africans should stop pulling one another down

HEALTH

By Kilemi Mwiria

On a recent trip to Hungary for the World Science Forum, I frequented Legends, a new sports cafÈ in Budapest. I was impressed by the commitment of the employees, especially chief waiter Pal Robert.

The owner trusts Robert immensely, giving him a free hand to manage the business, including cash collections, and banking. The two are not related in any way. This has freed the owner to manage other businesses and relax. It didn’t matter that Robert had yet to receive a pay hike; he was content to be associated with a successful business.

I asked myself, why it is rare to find employers in Kenya who trust their workers? You often hear employers groan and gravel about money lost to idle workers. And we read the horror stories of employees being locked for hours, even days, in factories. Due to employer cruelty, some Kenyans are dying in supermarkets, not the beaten down arid of the north.

Why do our people require a lot of supervision for doing what is good for them and the business owner? Failure to trust has meant many African entrepreneurs have to literally sleep at the workplace, leaving them little time and energy to explore new ventures.

Few African business partnerships succeed even when the partners are a relative, which is less common with Asian and European communities, where some family businesses grow into big multinationals. Many businesses in Africa are destroyed by relatives and dependents. Failure to trust relatives and children makes some traders turn to second and third wives to manage new branches of their expanding enterprises. Yet, spouses can be a huge drain, for lack of relevant skills or because they find this the ideal opportunity to share newly found wealth with family members and maybe outdo the co-wives in spending.

But there is also envy. African families sometimes harbour hatred at a neighbour’s accomplishments, like a child making it to university, leave alone business success. I have a friend in the building industry that loses many workers to Asian competitors despite offering them better terms.

It has also been said that some top Government officers had rather give non-Africans contracts even when there are more capable Africans. We have stories of Africans who prefer white pilots, cooks and secretaries. Some Africans just cannot stand one of their own being as successful as an Asian.

It needs to be said that the culture of unsupervised work is more entrenched in the West. As a result, fewer workers are more productive than our own. Chinese workers are also teaching us much on efficiency at work. Our workers have to appreciate that work benefits to both the proprietor and them, and that we are not all equally gifted.

Our entrepreneurs can also contribute to changing the mentality of their workers for the better by improving their working conditions. Our workers need to see that Africans can be good employers. One way of demonstrating this spirit is to relate better with our workers by treating them as colleagues who have ideas to offer and not simple working robots. The proprietor of Legends in Budapest often socialised with Robert, his senior waiter. And Robert had no shade of inferiority, unwilling to stomach unbecoming treatment by his boss.

Also important is the leadership. It will not be enough to ask Kenyans to simply be proud to be Kenyan. Those who have done well in life should demonstrate their patriotism by first pulling those closest to them along and by promoting what is Kenyan in what they do. By loving those not as lucky as them, there will be less envy from neighbour’s. We shall also need to give self made Africans more visibility than we sometimes give non-Africans; sometimes such successes are not welcome home.

The writer is an Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology and MP for Tigania West.

[email protected]

www.twitter.com/kilemi

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