Rare post from Daniel (warning: work related & long!)

[NB To lighten up this post I will be interspersing it with some photos from our conference that tell a better story than the one I am writing :)]

A while ago I had an NSRC meeting (it was ‘yesterday’ when I started this post, but is now somewhat longer ago!) I have to confess that I dread these meetings, probably above most other things I have to deal with. It feels like getting into a boxing ring with 4 angry Tanzanians and taking a beating :) This is an exaggeration.

On the plus side, this arena is definitely the one where I feel I learn a lot about the cultural differences between African and Western thinking (to generalise**). However it does sometimes makes me feel that although cultural understanding (i.e. understanding how the other person thinks and why) is possible, cultural acceptance (i.e. accepting that the other person’s way of thinking is right, or can be right) is considerably more difficult!


[Warning: everything below is necessarily filtered through my own perceptions and feelings, and so there is no guarantee that any of it (especially where I attribute motives) is accurate…It is also a huge generalisation based on my experiences.]

As an example: The African ‘support system’, as you probably know, is built around an intertwined system of family dependency (where everyone is family). i.e. ‘I have a problem and you’re doing OK; I will ask you for help, and you will give it to me because when the roles are reversed, you will need me to do the same.’

It appears that the employer is also expected to be part of this family. For example, I am often told that MAF should be like a father to the staff “You should see us as your children” – usually in relation to talking about salaries and benefits. (However, I note that when we put in place policies that are intended to protect staff (i.e. restricting the level of debt they can get themselves in), I am told that I am being paternalistic and patronising and shouldn’t get involved in how people run their lives. Which shows that things are not always straightforward).

This is fairly difficult to accept coming from the West, and as a Western-run organisation this kind of thinking is not built into our systems. However, one of our ‘core values’ is ‘care’ for our staff, which encompasses the Western notion of a ‘duty of care’ to our staff, augmented by our Christian ethos.

However, this tends to be interpreted locally as “You are Christians, who are supposed to ‘care’, and so you should pay everyone as much as they want/need to maintain the lifestyle they want”. [I am not underestimating the level of poverty that some of our local staff live in, and it is very hard to reconcile this with the lifestyle we have (which, although not plush, is Western)]. However, the economic reality is that we cannot pay staff as much as they would like to be paid, and even if we could I am not sure we necessarily should. It is ingrained in me (and I think most people) that the level of ‘reward’ should be linked to the level of ‘work’ that is done. The African mindset seems to be more that the level of reward depends on who you know, and how well you can manipulate the system. To be fair this is the negative end of a scale, and I don’t want to generalise more than necessary. However, I have heard that it is almost a requirement to take advantage of your position, unless you want to be seen as slightly crazy.


The perception of the ‘employer as parent’ clashes when combined with the fairly new labour laws in the country. These are grounded in a European framework. However, because the country has a socialist background the laws are weighted heavily in favour of the employee. In a country where most employers would probably take every opportunity to take advantage of their staff, this may well be a good thing.

It turns out to be something of a nightmare for Western employers though – firstly because Western employers tend to try and comply with the law, whereas I suspect for most Tanzanian employers the law is something to work around. The other factor is that Western employers (like Westerners generally) are seen to have bottomless pockets. This means that when you are sued for firing/terminating/retrenching someone (which is a matter of course – the court system is weighted such that it is always ‘worth a try’) you are at a distinct disadvantage.

(I won’t go into details about the various court cases we are currently in the middle of :( )

Another big cultural learning curve took place yesterday. We are trying to negotiate a retrenchment package, as the Labour Office has advised that a bi-lateral agreement is the best way to avoid being sued. I asked the Committee to consult with the staff and give me an ‘opening bid’. They suggested a blanket policy of 12 months basic salary. I thought this was both unfair and unaffordable, and so countered with a structured package taking into account age of the employee, length of service (‘capped’ at a certain number of years) and whether MAF was able to secure them alternative employment. They took this away to discuss, and came back with “We think the package should be 12 months basic salary”. I was somewhat dumbfounded, and thought that the negotiations had ground to a halt. I said that I felt like I was being blackmailed, and that they had flatly rejected my attempts to negotiate. They were genuinely flabbergasted at my reaction. After unpacking it a bit more, what they were actually saying was “We don’t see (or don’t accept) the rationale behind your package. Try again”.

It is possible that these issues are not cultural at all (or at least less than I think), and it is just that I have never been on the sharp end of labour relations before, but I am definitely learning things. Primarily; doing anything unilaterally is inviting a world of pain. Even if I discover or decide that we are doing something wrong, it is not acceptable to just correct it. There needs to be discussion, consultation and consensus for any changes to work. (Changes can be made, but there is a massive difference between making changes and changes actually working). To practitioners of change management I am sure this is obvious, but knowing something in theory and actually learning it through experience are two different things.


I am aware that my posts on these subjects probably seem rather negative, if not racist. I hope I am not, and I am good friends with many of the local staff (as much as one can be when one is the ‘employer’). I am just trying to reflect some of the struggles I face managing a cross-cultural organisation, in a ‘foreign’ (in the truest sense of the word) context. Congratulations if you made it this far :)

To temper this post, although I am quite excited about moving to Kenya, I am extremely miserable about leaving Tanzania. And surprisingly, it is not the profit and loss account or the balance sheet that I will miss, but the people. To someone who finds making relationship connections quite hard, to tear these up after four years in a close knit social and working setting is, I suspect, likely to be harder than I would have thought. On this level (although maybe not on other levels) I anticipate this move being harder than the initial move to Tanzania.


** As an interesting aside; coming from Europe, it feels like stereotyping to 'Africans'. However, more often that not, this is how my local colleagues describe themselves. This is actually fair enough, if you think about it, as the National Borders - and thus 'nationalities' - were pretty much written by a bunch of ruler-wielding bureaucrats in Europe anyway.