Agricuhuol Administrorion 11 (1982) 295-302

ADMINISTRATIVE CO-ORDINATION IN AFRICAN RURAL DEVELOPMENT

JAMES LEACH

Vine Cottage, StifJey, Wells, Norfolk NR23 IAJ, Great Britain

(Received: 14 June, 1982)

INTRODUCTION

This paper raises a number of issues and makes observations on the problems and possibilities connected with governmental organisations for rural development, of which agricultural field services are an important part. These issues are illustrated from the experience of five countries: Botswana, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Zimbabwe. These give a sample ranging from the fairly simple case of Botswana, with its small population of approximately 800,000, to the huge federal state of Nigeria (population probably well over 80 million). All these countries possess some minerals, from Kenya’s very modest supplies to Botswana’s diamonds and Nigeria’s oil. Yet, the mass of their populations still depends principally upon the subsistence production of cereal and root crops, and all except Nigeria rely to a large extent on the export of agricultural produce. All five countries had to convert and develop their colonial administrations to meet the needs and demands of democratically elected national governments, national development and the world economy.

CENTRAL GOVERNMENT ORGANISATION

A central issue is the tension between rural development and agricultural development. ‘Agricultural development’ covers those items which are normally included in the portfolio of a Minister of Agriculture, principally crops and livestock and connected services, such as research, extension, inputs, credit and marketing. ‘Rural development’ includes all those aspects of the development of the rural areas which are assisted by government effort. There are many aspects of such development-the different parts of agricultural development, forestry, fisheries, non-agricultural commercial and industrial enterprises, physical infrastructure,

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social infrastructure, efforts to reach the lower income groups and the disadvan- taged and employment programmes. Small farmers, for the success of their enterprises, need and demand services which are supplied by departments other than those which commonly form Ministries of Agriculture. It is now generally recognised that agricultural development depends to a large extent on such services, and most governments have therefore adopted a broad based or ‘rural development’ approach to complement their agricultural development policies. The adminis- trative problems of such an approach are, however, formidable; and for many planners and administrators, ‘coordination’ appears to be the critical issue.

There are very few departments or agencies of government which are not concerned, in one way or another, with rural development. A rough and ready list of ministerial portfolios in the countries with which this paper is concerned may be grouped under the following headings.

General government President’s Office, including Cabinet Office, Finance and Development Planning,

Legal and Justice, Public Service, Information, Foreign Affairs, Police, Armed Forces, Prisons, Labour, Land, Internal Affairs, including Immigration, Local Government.

Production Agriculture, including crops, Livestock, Forestry, Fisheries, Commerce and

Industry, Minerals and Mining.

Social services Education, Health, Community Development, Welfare, Co-operatives.

Physical infrastructure Transport sector (roads, road transport, airways, water transport),

Telecommunications, Water, Buildings. Clearly, most of the last three groups are more directly concerned with rural

development than some of the general government group. But it is also true that most of the ministries in the general government group control vital aspects of government policy and take decisions on which rural development largely depends. In effect, then, rural development is everybody’s business.

Each country has a different way of arranging these portfolios and inter-relating them. Some have a separate ministry for each of the above subjects and additional ministries for culture, sport, women’s affairs and youth. Others group subjects together under composite ministries. For example, Botswana opted for a relatively small number of ministries, grouping livestock, forestry, fisheries and co-operatives under a Ministry of Agriculture; local government, lands, community development, social welfare, surveys, urban and regional planning under a Ministry of Local

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Government and Lands; finance, development planning, audit, customs and taxes under a Ministry of Finance and Development Planning; all physical infrastructure except water under a Ministry of Works and Communications. Kenya, in contrast, has separate ministries for Agriculture, Livestock, Natural Resources, Co- operatives and Social Services, Finance, Economic Planning and Community Affairs, and for most of the separate items of physical infrastructure.

An illustration from the agricultural sector indicates the complexity of re- lationships. A strong and effective Ministry of Agriculture may develop the services listed below, in addition to its main field extension, research, inputs, credit and marketing services :

Agricultural information service, including audio visual aids, cinema vans, adult education classes, popular theatre, extension material production. Agricultural engineering service including mechanical tillage and cultivation, conservation works, agricultural produce processing (harvesting and milling), access road construction and maintenance, water pump repair and mainten- ance, and dam construction. Agricultural education in secondary and primary schools, school farms and gardens.

Every one of the above subjects is potentially the responsibility, or partly the responsibility, of another ministry or agency. It is interesting to observe how different countries deal with this type of situation.

The usual practice is for each ministry or agency to establish the service in which it is interested, even if this means duplicating the service of another ministry. It is only in small administrations; for example, that of Botswana, in which inter-ministerial communications are simpler, and the control of a combined Ministry of Finance and Development Planning more decisive, that duplication and overlapping can be, and often is, avoided. When there is some overlapping, understandings are sometimes reached between the Ministries concerned, as has happened in Kenya in the field of agricultural education, and in Botswana and Tanzania over adult education and literacy campaigns.

With regard to coordination between ministries at national level, clearly the President (if he is an executive president: otherwise the Prime Minister) has a coordinating role, and the Ministry of Finance and Planning (sometimes these subjects are covered by two separate ministries) exercises some measure of control through the power of the purse. These two controls function tolerably well in most developing countries-at least they are recognised as necessary and desirable. The difficulties begin when roles and responsibilities overlap, or where one ministry needs the services of another ministry in order to fulfil its own responsibilities.

For example, the Kenya and Botswana Governments both undertook Employment Surveys, and both experienced great difficulty in working out mechanisms for implementing the many excellent recommendations, because so

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many agencies were involved; it took Nigeria 20 years to establish a Department of Rural Development in its Federal Ministry of Agriculture; Tanzania has undergone a long process of trial and error in developing administrative structures for its Ujamaa programme and its seventeen regions; Zimbabwe is currently in the throes of working out its rural development policy and relationships between its Ministries of Agriculture, Lands Resettlement and Rural Development, and Local Government and Housing.

Many devices are used to cope with this type of situation-inter-ministerial committees, parastatal corporations or authorities, project authorities or project management units, new departments or even new ministries.

For example, Nigeria is organising its food production programme in the form of Agricultural Development Projects and an Accelerated Development Area Programme through Project Units, four Federal Agricultural Support Units, a Federal Agricultural Coordinating Unit and a Federal Department of Rural Development. Zimbabwe created a Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development, a Department of Rural Development and an Agricultural and Rural Development Authority; under the aegis of the latter, an inter-ministerial committee has coordinated the implementation of the resettlement programme. Inter-ministerial Committees have been used in Botswana as a means to achieve consensus and dissemination of information on rural extension, natural resources, drought relief, rural industries, district planning, and rural development as a whole.

External aid often has a great influence on the design of governmental organisations for rural development, particularly in connection with establishing project committees, project management units, and project authorities. These structures are sometimes necessary but they are all too often set up without carefully working out their relationships with existing structures, or how they will actually operate, and before their administrative and personnel opportunity costs have been calculated. Donor agencies appear to have na’ive faith in boards and committees consisting of permanent Secretaries and very senior officials, who are usually too busy to attend meetings, and send representatives who rarely have the authority or knowledge to commit their ministries.

Administrators love organising people. The crucial question to ask is: ‘What for? What happens as a result of institution-building or reorganisation? A central concern must be to emphasise mechanisms to achieve co-operation and consensus in order to remove conflict and to achieve results.

Dialogue and communications are more important than structures. Three relationships have to be considered. First, there are vertical relationships within ministries at the centre and between the national headquarters in the Capital and the officials at different field levels-province or region, district, sub-district, and village. Secondly, there are horizontal relationships between the officers of different ministries at the different levels, and, thirdly, there are the relationships between government officials and the local and traditional and community authorities. Any

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structure for organising rural development must take into account these three relationships.

There are three basic ways of dealing with them-by a wholly centralised system of direction and control, by a decentralisation of authority and responsibility for taking decisions while retaining control at the centre, or by a devolution of authority and power to regional or local authorities. Whichever pattern is followed, the ministry with responsibility for regional and local administration plays a pivotal role.

In their attempts to build institutions to deliver goods and services to rural areas, governments have tried various formulas. Tanzania and Zambia have established regional authorities with decentralised authority and finance, and Tanzania has produced detailed and funded development plans for almost all of its seventeen regions. Nigeria has developed a federal system on the American model, while Botswana has opted for a more integrated system, with local authorities wielding considerable political power and taking local policy planning and funding allocation decisions within a centrally controlled financial system.

LINKAGES AND INFORMATION

From the wide variety of arrangements described, the importance of linkages and information stands out. The coordinator who knows what everyone else is doing and is supposed to do is much more effective than the coordinator who merely relies on the authority given to him to coordinate. Information does not flow automati- cally and linkages have to be created. Authority, of course, is important but it is not nearly so important for coordination as information. There is a school of thought, largely found within aid agencies and at the higher levels of bureaucracies, which is obsessed with the need for authority. It is believed that coordination is achieved by appointing a lead agency, or a project authority, with immediate access to top level decision-makers. The really critical levels of coordination are often not at the top level, but lower down, at head of department or head of section levels. Problems of structure, coordination and integration are usually not questions of higher level decision-making: they are due to lack of information, or of understanding, or plain awkwardness, or small mindedness. Establishing a mechanism for oiling the wheels of inter-departmental communication and co-operation is much more important than a high level coordinating committee.

A device for ironing out difficulties over responsibilities and for securing better communications, which has been tried in Botswana, is worth mentioning. A small, non-executive staff unit was established in the office of the Vice President and Minister of Finance and Development Planning. Its function was to serve as the Secretariat of a number of rural development coordinating committees and, in doing this, to act as an inter-ministerial liaison office between ministries. One of the

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keys to the relative success of this unit is its non-executive nature: another is the effective and useful service it renders to ministries which have rural development responsibilities-they do not feel threatened: they are pleased to be helped: the unit is able to be effective and useful because of its access to a wide range of information, especially about resources: finally, and most important of all, the unit is staffed by hand-picked senior officers who operate in the name of the Vice President and Secretary of Finance and Development and are backed by them. The Botswana model is not a panacea, but it illustrates a number of important principles: (a) coordination is best achieved on the basis of information-sharing and co-operation; (b) executive ministries co-operate if they do not feel threatened and (c) high level political backing to a small expert staff which is influential but non-executive is a good recipe for coordination.

Time horizons are also important factors in administrative development. It is natural that politicians should want quick results: for good reasons, as well as not so good reasons, they want to see projects implemented quickly. So do donor agencies which supply the resources for projects. But, in the sphere of institutions and organisations, it is unwise and naive to expect rapid change.

Those of us who have lived in small rural communities anywhere in the world should remind ourselves constantly of the dynamics of village life and of the nature and time-scale of changes when they do occur. Social engineering is all very well, but it is fatally easy to forget that human societies, like human beings, are fractious and unpredictable. We do not give new ideas or new structures time to prove themselves; like the Athenians of the first century, we are principally interested ‘to tell or hear some new thing’. When something is started, and appears to be making some headway, not enough sustained effort is put into continued support, monitoring and replanning. Lessons are not learnt or applied. Experiments are prematurely written off as failures, and something new is tried in their place. Rural development is a process of social and economic change and quick results should not be expected. Societies and institutions take time to change and grow.

SPECIAL PROBLEMS

There are two cases that need special mention. The first is co-operatives. Co- operatives always appear to pose for governments a problem of location in the organisational structure. Should they be the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture, of a social service ministry, of an independent authority, or of a separate ministry? In Botswana, they are the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture, in Zimbabwe of the Ministry of Lands, Resettlement and Rural Development and in Kenya of the Ministry of Co-operatives and Social Services. What matters is not the location of co-operatives, but the defining of the department responsible for co-operatives. How co-operatives are promoted is the crucial

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question: if they are pushed by government as a mechanism for providing goods and services they seldom work well. Co-operatives, by their very nature, must be organisms that have been formed by their members to satisfy a need, usually an economic need, which they feel themselves. Co-operative Departments often run far ahead of co-operators’ ability to manage their own affairs, they do not give priority to the education and training ofco-operators and they allow their regulatory role to overshadow their promotional role.

The second case is Community Development. In the past, it was common practice for governments to form a new cadre of Community Development workers to take care of self help, ‘felt needs’, ‘bottom-up’ development and organising communities. In Kenya, Community Development Assistants, who were employed by local government councils and guided by a central government cadre of Community Development Officers, played a major role in organising the national Harambee (self help) campaign in the 1960s. Community Development departments were in the forefront of efforts to involve communities in their own development, and they were often the first departments to be ‘localised’. It was intended, in many countries, that there should be frontline, all-purpose village development workers who would act as links and contact points through whom communities could contact other government extension workers. Practice, in most cases, did not fulfil these expectations: the rigidities of the hierarchical and jealous departmental systems ensured that the Community Development workers concerned themselves mainly- often solely-with the affairs of the ministry to which they were attached, and this was usually a Ministry of Social Services, in one form or another. Their links with agricultural extension workers, in particular, were weak or non-existent. They became, in effect, social welfare workers.

There is a very good case for recognising and acknowledging this trend and for taking the following decisions. First, all extension workers should be trained in communication techniques and in working with groups and communities-in fact, in the theory and skills of community development. Secondly, the role of organising village community development funding should be a responsibility of local authorities; this does not require a separate group of extension workers. The role of coordinating village development activities is already a function of the local political, local authority and local administrative organisations. Thirdly, social development and social welfare extension staff cadres should be developed in accordance with the needs and structures of individual countries. Community Development departments and cadres should be renamed and reoriented to become social development and social welfare staff, as has already happened in Kenya.

CONCLUSIONS

A number of conclusions regarding coordination emerge from this review. First, coordinating institutions and structures should serve, rather than direct-they

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should make themselves really useful to the ministries and departments concerned. Secondly, the principal watchwords should be co-operation and consensus, replac- ing authority and direction. Thirdly, coordination structures and mechanisms take time to construct and work, and quick results should not be expected-institution building efforts should be sustained over a long enough period to establish new structures firmly. Fourthly, a step by step approach, learning by experience, is almost invariably more effective than attempting to get everything right from the beginning. Such an approach also helps to ensure that the participation of the people is achieved. Fifthly, whenever possible, the existing mechanism or institutions should be utilised. If new structures are necessary, relationships and inter-communication procedures between the new and the existing institutions should be worked out in detail and with a degree of care which is rarely found in rural development planning.