The quest for private investment

Currently the National Investment Commission (NIC) is working on a change management process to restructure the organization.  146 people work at NIC, but the estimated required number of employees according to the new organizational chart is 50.  What do the other 100 do?

The government knows that the NIC is operating with more people than they need, but in this case its priority is not efficiency, is to create jobs. In a country like Liberia where unemployment rates are very high, the government started to use civil service as a safety net. This is why it is not rare to see people sitting around the NIC building with no clear job descriptions.

This issue makes political factors very important in the change management process. In the MPAID program we learned how a policy needs to address three components: 1) technically correct, 2) administrative feasible, 3) have political support. No matter how well designed NIC’s new organization is on paper, it will probably not be able to address component number 3 and therefore the ultimate solution would have to sacrifice a little bit of component number 1. The government is aware of this fact and the solution they seemed to have found is to keep these “vulnerable” workers but at the same time make sure to employ the 50 people they need to function.

The whole process is still in early stages.  The organizational chart still needs to be approved and the term of reference of the employees still needs to be determined.  However, the main challenge is going to appear after the “desk work” is done. Once they need to go out and recruit real people to do the jobs. Unfortunately most of the people NIC needs to fulfill its mandate are not currently part of the staff and finding them is not an easy task.

A few months ago they were looking for a head of certain department. They hired international consultants and spent nearly 4 months in the recruitment process. At the end the process was declared vacant. They could not find any candidates with the appropriate qualifications.

This turns into a vicious circle; without the adequate human resources NIC will not be effective in attracting investment into Liberia and without investment the creation of new jobs is almost impossible.  With no investment there will be fewer opportunities for Liberians, fewer incentives to go to school or to come back to their country for those educated abroad.

NIC is just an example of the problematic in countries in which private sector development is still incipient. Liberia seems to understand that; and that is why they are focusing their efforts in promoting private investment and developing public private partnerships. However, as long as the state capacities are low, the labor force unskilled and the infrastructure poor, the quest for private investment will remain a very slow process.