...well at least for the next two and a half months.
...And maybe not CFO, but I just found out that I have all financial responsibilities of the organization I’m working with. Let me rewind a smidge, yes? I knew I would be taking over some duties, the main one being QuickBooks, from a woman who is very pregnant, her last day is Friday, the Friday at the end of September. But there was no urgency on her part to bestow upon me the inner workings of her position, despite my poor attempts to set up a time to meet with her. From my initial perspective it did not look like she was terribly busy. And I was not clear on when her last day would be.
On Monday I reminded people that I would be out of the office Thursday and Friday due to Rosh Hashanah, aka the Jewish New Year. All of a sudden it’s an emergency in the director’s eyes that I have all the knowledge of the finance operations of the NGO. I’ve got two and half days to learn it. Somehow two and half days shrinks into a 4-5 hour review of budgets and QuickBooks entries. I will be writing checks, making bank withdraws, issuing the payroll checks, managing the keys to the safe, transferring the wires into Ugandan Shillings from the donors (chances of receiving donor funds in the next three months are slim), and all things related to finances. I’ll also need to devise a system for creating a more accurate budget. At this point the budget is a very rough estimate of expenses with a 5 percent inflator on every single line item, rent to program costs, across the board.
In some ways I can make this job much more difficult than it is, in others I can go along with the system they’ve set up, make a few excel models that can be used in the future for predicting budgets and call it a successful volunteer run.
In short, I will have a lot to be busy with these next few months. My mission is to keep things simple but create a more accurate way for the organization to plan for the future when I am no longer there.
Organizational Change?
One thing I don’t think I will be able to change is avoiding these crisis modes of operations. I have learned my lesson that I need to be a bit more direct in arranging meetings with staff so that we don’t end up meeting at the eleventh hour.
This got me to thinking about managing style in Uganda and the US. I’m speaking about the average norm, in both cases there are certainly exceptions on both sides of the spectrum, but the general feeling is different in the two places. In the States there are a variety of manager types but the basic mentality, countrywide, is the expectation that employees do their work and perform to some level of expectation. When the boss says to do something, it gets done. I’m wondering if that is the norm in Uganda.
What I’m finding and hearing, is that in Uganda there is a level of expectation from the employee that as long as he shows up to work, he will get paid. This is not a mentality that starts in the corporate or nonprofit workplace. It is spread throughout all sectors, most notably, the government. Corruption is rampant in the government sector. The expectation has become that the government doesn’t provide, but donor funds from the west will support the country. In fact, donor assistance contribute to almost one third of GDP. To give credit where credit is due, President Museveni has done a magnificent job enticing donors from all over the world to contribute to his country. For the students who make it to the university level, I was told recently, that they are there to “think, not to do work.” Upon entering the workforce, given the environment of leaders leading through taking bribes and receiving other monies on the side, and an education background that graduates students for not necessarily completing all the work in the syllabus, employees then expect to be paid merely for showing up. One would encounter this more regularly here than in the States, of course this mentality exists in American too. Again, this is the general stereotype of the Ugandan worker, not necessarily the mindset of people everywhere.
So when the boss kicks an employee out of a meeting for not producing their quarterly report, which is supposed to include highlights of the work that the employee has performed in the past three months, the employee perception is that the boss is mean and strict. In a world where traffic laws do not cover what lane of traffic you are in or how fast to drive, and banks cannot track a person who takes a loan and moves to another town when they cannot pay it back, the feeling of freedom is much stronger than that of an American who has to deal with so many rules, courts and the system that can track and follow through more thoroughly.
In jobs where the pay is much less, like the taxi drivers, police and street market vendors, any opportunity of easy money is seized upon. The mentality for most of these workers is that the White West has all the money. And for the most part, it is true. If I pay four dollars extra in a special hire cab, I probably won’t know or make a big deal about it. Sometimes it’s not four dollars.
A friend of ours was recently pulled over by a policeman for answering his phone while driving. This was not a traffic policeman who is the only police that can issue a traffic ticket, evident by the type of uniform they wear. This officer said that talking on a phone and driving is a very criminal activity and that the only way to cure this situation was for our friend to mobile money the officer three million shillings, about a thousand USD. Mobile money is a way for people to send money through their mobile phones. Our friend does not have the mobile money service and the officer took whatever money our friend had and told him to get the service and send the money. They exchanged numbers. As luck would have it, a few days later after not following through on the officer’s demands, our friend was driving by the scene of the incident and the same officer pulled out and started following him. Our friend decided to head straight to the US Embassy. At a stop along the way the officer pulls up alongside our friend and orders him to pull over. Our friend replies that what the officer is doing is harassment and that he is driving straight to the US Embassy and not to bother him again. The officer continues to follow until our friend is about two blocks from the embassy, at which point he stops his pursuit.
The officer’s plan of an easy three million shillings went terribly awry and he grew scared. So scared that he called our friend a few days later to find out what happened at the embassy. Now with the upper hand, our friend told the officer over the phone that nothing will happen as long as the officer does not harass or do anything further regarding this matter. The officer’s reply was “thank you.”
My point is that the expectation of the worker is different, much different from what I am used to. Uganda is a country where people get by with very little money. Even with a job, the rungs of the ladder get very narrow and not many people can get themselves up it without receiving help from someone higher up on that ladder. Jobs are scarce and many qualified people work for free or nothing. Some people take matters into their own hands to earn money, and easily get away with it most of the time, that is what their leaders do. I’m hopeful that this mentality is changing. Western culture is becoming more the norm and as the country develops so will the schools and the workplace….hopefully.
