Editorial
Punch-up over handouts
Burkina Faso depends on cotton for about 40% of its merchandise exports. Alas,
prices are not always what they might be. According to the International Cotton
Advisory Committee, world prices would have been about 26% higher in the 2001-02
season were it not for the $4 billion in subsidies America lavished on its
cotton growers.
The pickings may soon become less rich. This month the World Trade Organisation
(WTO) upheld its ruling that such subsidies distorted trade and breached limits
agreed in 1994. Mr Bush’s budget for the coming fiscal year proposes deep cuts
in farm subsidies. Furthermore, a promise to eliminate rich countries’ export
subsidies (eventually) and to make a “substantial” cut in other kinds of
handouts was vital to reviving the Doha round of global trade talks last summer.
But as the round inches forward, some free-traders are troubled. Jagdish
Bhagwati, an economist at Columbia University, is one of them. Agricultural
subsidies are certainly undesirable, he wrote recently in the Far Eastern
Economic Review. But the claim that removing them will help the poorest
countries is “dangerous nonsense” and a “pernicious” fallacy.
Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr Bhagwati’s at Columbia University, agrees.
His argument rests on a surprising observation: most poor countries are net
importers of agricultural goods. A study in 1999 found that 33 of the 49 poorest
countries import more farm goods than they export; 45 of them are net importers
of food. Subsidies depress the price of agricultural products on world markets.
That hurts rival exporters, as Burkina Faso can testify. But importers gain.
The impact on different households within a poor country is another question. In
a recent book, William Cline, of the Centre for Global Development, an American
think-tank, points out that poor households tend to be rural, and rural
households tend to sell more food than they eat. For them, rising farm prices
are to be welcomed. It is the urban poor that should worry—and maybe the rulers
of poor and fragile nations, who have traditionally striven to keep food prices
low. Hard-pressed peasants are less of a threat than disgruntled city folk
within a stone’s throw of the presidential palace. An end to OECD farm
subsidies, however, would transfer money from town to countryside.
If such a transfer is to be welcomed, Mr Panagariya asks, why wait for OECD
countries to cut their subsidies? Poor countries could take matters into their
own hands by slapping a countervailing tariff on the subsidised produce. That
would raise the domestic price of food, benefiting rural households. It would
also be a neat way of raising revenue at rich countries’ expense.
Mr Panagariya points out that many poor countries enjoy privileged access to the
sheltered markets of the European Union. Thus they already enjoy higher prices
for their exports than they could expect to find on the open market.
A warning signal for the aviation
industry
According to experts, air transport is the safest mode of transport. This is
because every precaution is taken to ensure that from take off to landing, no
accident takes place.
Years back, it was reported in the media that a certain aircraft belonging to an
international firm was involved in a very minor accident which caused a slight
scratch on its wing.
The firm dispatched specialists all the way from Europe to Africa to investigate
the causes of the accident.
Later on it was reported that the engineers who inspected the aircraft before it
took off had certified that the aircraft would fly to Africa and make its trip
back without having an accident.
This shows how sensitive air transport is as far as safety is concerned. Care is
taken from the stage of off-loading fuel from tankers to the refuelling
facilities. Aviation fuel is not supposed to be contaminated or mixed with any
other oil.
Recently, an ATCL Boeing 737 had all its four rear tyres burst immediately when
it touched down. The problem was not with the aircraft, but with the runway
itself.
The cause of the tyre burst was some foreign bodies that had punctured the
tyres. This story is similar to the mishap that prompted the Concorde to be
grounded.
Still we believe that aircrafts are the safest mode of transport. But what about
the airports, the run ways that carry these aircrafts? Are they also safe?
In regard to the Mwanza airport mishap, we doubt about the safety of some of our
airports. Foreign objects enter runways during down pours or even during storms.
This is a crucial issue that the authorities have to deal with.
In short, airport runways should be located so that foreign objects can be
minimized or eliminated; rain water should not flood runways. The safety of
aircrafts is dependent on well maintained runways.
Analysis
Are the new
passports affordable?
Passports are important
documents that allow someone to travel out of the country for business, tourism,
education, and for many other purposes including travelling for medical
attention or attending workshops and seminars. But issuing one is not that easy,
as Timothy Kitundu explains.
For an ordinary Tanzanian, obtaining a passport is so difficult that it may take
a month or so from the time of application until the document is ready.
Some time back, I remember two of my colleagues had to miss a course in
journalism, which was held in Mozambique, because they couldn’t get their
passports ready in one week’s time.
My colleagues did not fail to obtain the passports because they could not afford
to pay the Tsh. 20,000 fee for the passports but it was because of the
bureaucracy.
The process itself was long and cumbersome, so by the time they got their
passports, the course was over. However, my colleagues could not blame any one
as the long process was aimed at curbing counterfeits.
Recently, the government introduced new computerized passports that would get
rid of forgeries hence maintain the good reputation of the country. The
passports which are machine readable would however be more expensive compared to
the old ones.
The new passports will cost Tsh. 50,000. However, the problem lies with the
hiked fee which most people say would be unaffordable to the majority of
Tanzanians.
According to the Minister of Home Affairs, Omar Ramadhan Mapuri, printing of the
passports would cost the government a total of Tsh. 1.1 billion adding that a US
based company had been awarded the tender.
Despite the passports bearing a number of features that forgers would not be
able to replicate, people have complained saying that the government was either
trying to offset the printing costs by hiking the fees or it had turned
passports into a project to reap handsome profits.
A survey carried out by a local English daily reveals that almost all
interviewees spoke of the new fees in relation to the income of most Tanzanians.
They cited that the common low income earner gets not more than Tsh. 48,000 per
month.
Although some of the respondents concurred with the government that the new fee
was fair considering the costs of the new sophisticated passports, the majority
still argued that it was not proper for the government to shift the burden to
the people who had not been initially involved in the whole process of these new
passports.
Most interviewees proposed that at least the fee could have been set at Tsh.
30,000 which would have been fair to both the government and the low income
earners.
Again the period of phasing out the old passports has been put at six months.
People say this is too short taking into consideration the prevailing
bureaucracy. Most people opt for at least more than six months. Unless, they
say, the government has computerized the process in all aspects.
The government has solved one problem and that is curbing forgery as far as
passport issuing is concerned. This is because the process has been
computerized. Computerisation, if it is to be of benefit, should also include
getting the passport in a day or two from the time of application.
A number of questions still remain unanswered: for how long from applying for a
passport should a person wait until he or she is issued with a passport? Or has
the government ‘computerized’ the passports in only one aspect that they are
impossible to forge?
Did the government conduct any survey to know the ability of Tanzanians in
paying for the new passports and what were the results? Is history going to
repeat itself about my colleagues who missed their training because they could
not obtain passports in a week?
The clear
leader
Marcus Buckingham spent two decades studying great business leaders. His
conclusion: True leaders have a unique ability to make things simple.
Dip into most corporate or business-school curricula on leadership and you’ll
find a mind-numbing list of skills that the aspiring leader must master, from
motivating to communicating to counselling to managing conflict, and on and
on. But, says Marcus Buckingham, that’s a shame, because those disciplines,
while important, fail to get to the heart of true leadership.
Here, in his own words, Buckingham maps out the core concepts that mark
superior leadership.
Leaders are compelled by the future
There’s something unique and different that makes a leader, and it’s not about
creativity or courage or integrity. As important as they are, you can have
those attributes and still fail to be a great leader. A leader’s job is to
rally people toward a better future. Leaders can’t help but change the
present, because the present isn’t good enough. They succeed only when they
find a way to make people excited by and confident in what comes next.
Turn anxiety into confidence
For a leader, the challenge is that in every society ever studied, people fear
the future. The future is unstable, unknown, and therefore potentially
dangerous. So in order to succeed, leaders must engage our fear of the unknown
and turn it into spiritedness. By far the most effective way to turn fear into
confidence is to be clear — to define the future in such vivid terms that we
can see where we are headed. Clarity is the antidote to anxiety, and therefore
clarity is the preoccupation of the effective leader. If you do nothing else
as a leader, be clear.
Be clear about whom you serve
Leaders can be wrong. They can’t be confusing. If we are going to follow you
into the future, we need to know precisely whom we are trying to please. It’s
a scary thing to please all of the people all of the time. So to calm our
fear, we need you to narrow our focus. Tell us who will be judging our
success. When you do this with clarity, you give us confidence — confidence in
our judgment, in our decisions, and ultimately in our ability to know where to
look to determine if we have fulfilled our mission.
Be clear about why you’re going to win
I’m struck by how often leaders come up with four or five core strengths. We
hear it all the time: “Our strengths are our people, our productivity, our
creativity, and our efficiency.” Somehow, many leaders think their job is to
analyze the world’s reality and complexity and reflect it back to their
people. Not true. As a leader, your job is to make people more confident about
the future you’re dragging them into. To that end, you need to tell them why
they’re going to win. There are many competitors out there. Why will we beat
them? There are many obstacles in our path. Why will we overcome them? The
more clearly you can answer these questions, the more confident we will be,
and therefore the more resilient, the more persistent, and the more creative.
If you want to be clear, act
Of course, a leader must take action — action leads to impact. But actions
also possess a separate, equally powerful quality. Actions are unambiguous. If
you, the leader, can highlight a few carefully selected actions, then your
followers will no longer have to infer the future from theoretical
pronouncements about “core values” or your “mission statement.” We will simply
look to see what actions you take and found our faith and confidence on these.
But be aware that we respond best to two types of action: symbolic action and
systemic action.
Symbolic action is just that — a representation of what the future can look
like. Symbolic action grabs our attention; it gives us something new and vivid
on which to focus. When Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor of New York, he
decided to get rid of squeegee men — street people who demanded payment for
cleaning windshields. His action was heavily symbolic: It didn’t change New
Yorkers’ day-to-day lives all that much, but it was a powerful demonstration
of what Giuliani meant when he talked about a better quality of life.
Giuliani also instituted a twice-weekly meeting in which more than 100 senior
police officers would gather to explain the city’s daily crime data and defend
their response to it. Giuliani declared that these meetings encouraged
accountability and transparency. But the meetings’ real power was that they
disrupted routines. For a leader, it’s important to disrupt routines. Systemic
action changes behavior. It makes people realize that the world is going to be
different because they’re doing different things. The future becomes clearer,
and out of that clarity comes confidence.
Effective leaders don’t have to be passionate or charming or brilliant. What
they must be is clear — clarity is the essence of great leadership. Show us
clearly who we should seek to serve, show us where our core strength lies,
show us which score we should focus on and which actions we must take, and we
will reward you by working our hearts out to make our better future come true.
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