Savannah Protocols: Strategy Playbook for Leading in Sub-Saharan Africa Frontier Markets

By Joe Mutizwa

The Savannah Protocols offers a helicopter view of the investment opportunities available across sub-Saharan Africa. The risks and potential obstacles are clearly articulated, and the business strategies suitable for sub-Saharan Africa frontier markets are explored through the use of metaphors that are grounded in the context of the subregion.
"What a wonderful book. Imaginative. Practical. Inspirational. Important for anyone involved with business leadership, not just in Africa. It takes us right into the heart of so many key leadership and management issues in these challenging times." Professor Gareth Morgan, author of Images of Organizations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Oct 30, 2015
• ISBN: 9781482825008

Joe Mutizwa

The author is a leading consultant on leadership development in Southern Africa. He has authored six books on various aspects of leadership. He writes from insights developed over thirty years in senior executive positions in the private sector. A Graduate of the London School of Economics, University of Zimbabwe, HEC-Paris and Oxford University’s Said Business School. He is a certified executive coach and a certified mediator. He Lives in Zimbabwe

Book preview

Copyright © 2015 by Joe Mutizwa.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

www.partridgepublishing.com/africa

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part One :The Opportunities

1. Lions Follow Buffalo Herds

2. Crocodiles of the Rift Valley Are Always Present at the Migrations

3. Vultures Know Where the Opportunities Lie

Part Two: The Business Risks in Sub-Saharan Africa

4. Laughing Hyenas Are Not Your Friends

5. When Two Elephants Fight, the Grass Gets Hurt

6. The Jungle Is Stronger Than the Elephant

Part Three: The Need for Due Diligence

7. Beehives Can Be Home to Both the Honeybee and the Snake at the Same Time

8. The Leopard Does Not Change Its Spots

Part Four: Risk Mitigation Strategies

9. A Colony of Mice Has No Granary

10. The African Fish Eagle Is an Efficient Predator Because Fishing Is Its Core Competence

11. Pythons Swallow Porcupines at Great Risk

12. Impalas Are Not Fat for a Reason

13. It Is Speed and Agility That Give the Cheetah a Deadly Advantage

14. Shrewd Birds Build Their Nests with the Feathers of Other Birds

15. When Spiderwebs Unite, They Can Tie Up a Lion

16. The Camel and the Cockroach Have a Common Trait—Resilience

17. The Best Time to Fold a Bull’s Hide Is When It Is Fresh

18. When You Are in a Tough Neighbourhood, Learn from the Honey Badger

19. Go to the Ant, Thou Sluggard

Conclusion

About the Author

Acknowledgements

I wish to mention my appreciation to the following individuals who assisted in various ways to make this book happen: Martha Musonda, my long-time assistant, for typing the manuscript and working out all the logistics with the publishers; Cherith Keen and Elisha Makadzange for proofreading the manuscript; Valentine Chitalu for his comprehensive and invaluable critique of the manuscript and for pointing me towards new insights; Professor Gareth Morgan for introducing me to the power of metaphors as an interpretive tool; Professor Jocelyn Alexander and Marc Thompson of Oxford University for encouraging me and agreeing to read the manuscript.

Introduction

This book was inspired by an experience I had while watching a herd of buffalo in the Ume River on the Zimbabwe side of Lake Kariba.

Lake Kariba is one of the largest man-made lakes in the world—over 290 kilometres long and covering an area over 5,000 square kilometres. It was created when a dam was built across the Zambezi River that starts in Angola in the North West and snakes its way between Zimbabwe and Zambia and then runs east through Mozambique to the Indian Ocean.

As we sat in a speedboat, watching a large herd of buffalo grazing on the shoreline and slowly moving away from the water towards the forest and the Matusadona mountains to the south-east of the lake, our guide, Eric, remarked that it was a near certainty that a pride of lions was somewhere nearby—out of sight but monitoring the movement of the large buffalo herd. I asked him how he knew this, and he replied, ‘Lions always follow buffalo herds.’

Much later, back on the houseboat moored in a remote bay in the middle of the jungle, I reflected on the story of the lions and the buffalo herd and thought about the protocols that govern conduct in the jungle.

As I thought about the extraordinary abundance of wildlife on the savannah and about the relationship between lions and buffalo herds that Eric had described, I found myself reflecting more on the significance of the daily drama that takes place within the wildlife communities across the African jungles and grasslands across the savannah. It occurred to me that hidden in those countless moments of drama across Africa were invaluable metaphors which could be used as lenses to interpret the challenges, actions, and strategies available to business people seeking their fortunes in the world’s last economic frontier market.

This book was born that night.

As I reflected on the panoramic views of sub-Saharan Africa, two vivid but contrasting pictures emerged. One was of the perennial Afro-pessimism that casts sub-Saharan Africa as ‘the hopeless continent’¹ where disease, war, poverty, illiteracy, and starvation are the defining narratives. The other sharply contrasting image was of ‘lions on the move’² amid a positive narrative characterized by the buzzphrase Africa rising³ used by Vijay Mahajan in his 2009 book of the same title and later taken up by The Economist magazine in its cover page two years later.⁴ This book uses metaphors and drama of the African wilderness to try to capture the range of insights and strategy options available to business leaders as well as to investors in sub-Saharan Africa.

Metaphors are powerful tools for interpreting reality by transferring a term from one system or level of meaning to another.⁵ In their book, The Mind of a Fox, Clem Sunter and Chantell Ilbury use the metaphors of the fox and the hedgehog to capture the differences between two very distinct mindsets and leadership philosophies, with the fox depicted as someone who is wise and adaptable, holding multiple perspectives and possessing the ability to think critically. The fox embraces and thrives in uncertainty and is action-oriented. By contrast, the hedgehog represents someone who holds a single big idea and who tries to interpret everything through this unidimensional lens. The fox is flexible and versatile, while the hedgehog is conservative and rigid in outlook.⁶

Metaphors can be viewed as ‘a way of thinking and a way of seeing’ that help us to interpret our world.⁷ In this book, I have borrowed images, symbols, or metaphors predominantly from the wildlife dramas of the African savannah and applied them to the business strategy domain so as to illuminate the different experiences that business leaders and investors in Africa can encounter. The metaphors are deployed as a tool to interpret the reality on the ground as well as to offer insights into business strategies.

The wildlife metaphors have been selected because of the richness of sub-Saharan Africa’s wildlife endowment, which is recognized globally as part of Africa’s great natural resource heritage. I am, in doing this, fully aware of the distorting power of metaphors and the ever-present risk that they may—if pushed too far—become ways of not seeing. They can also create unhelpful stereotypes if they are taken too literally. It should be mentioned too that metaphors are usually deeply rooted in the cultures within which they reside and can appear as being gimmicks to those unfamiliar with the nuances of a particular culture.

Africa is not an undifferentiated monolith. It is made up of fifty-five nations—forty-nine of which make up sub-Saharan Africa. Of these forty-nine countries, South Africa and Nigeria alone make up around 50 per cent of the region’s gross domestic product. The range of per capita GDP levels is astounding, from around US$330 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to around $15,000 in Botswana! Around two thousand languages and dialects are spoken across Africa. There is great cultural and religious diversity across a continent whose land mass is as big as the USA, China, India, Japan, the UK, most of continental Europe, and Eastern Europe combined.⁸ Given the huge geographical spread and great diversity across various dimensions, it can be simplistic to assume that there are common metaphors and symbols that resonate and have identical meanings across the entirety of sub-Saharan Africa. This is certainly not the case.

The animal legends that I have used in this book as tools to interpret the business opportunities, risks, and strategies across the subcontinent are subject to varying nuances and interpretations as one traverses Africa. Indeed, it is sometimes useful to look at specific regions within Africa that share common cultures and histories, such as North Africa, West Africa, East Africa, Central Africa, and Southern Africa. This is a warning that I must issue to the readers of this book. Africa is not a country, and Africa can really only be understood in terms of the richness of the diversity of its peoples and cultures. I believe, however, that the dramas of its fauna across its breadth do offer a common reference point that I have used here to highlight and inform discourse about Africa’s business prospects and the strategic imperatives that await business people who want to be active in sub-Saharan Africa. In painting this panoramic view of the region’s wildlife metaphors, I am fully aware of the risk that I may sometimes simplify the dramas by making them applicable across wider geographies than the case may be. Indeed, as Marlon Chigwende, the managing director of the Carlyle Group’s sub-Saharan Africa region, recently observed, there are individual forces at work within each of the fifty-five countries that make up Africa.

Book Structure

The book is divided into four parts.

Part One: The Opportunities

This part is made up of three metaphors which represent three different categories of investment opportunities found in sub-Saharan Africa. Metaphor 1 focuses on four traditional investment opportunities: resource extraction, agriculture, infrastructure development, and tourism. Metaphor 2 looks at the second category of opportunities that arise from the major transformative changes that are taking place across the region. These include the following large-scale migrations: the impact of dramatic demographic shifts, the spread of mobile commerce, the rise of aspiration-driven consumerism, the growth of the service economy, the resurgence of manufacturing and value addition in selected locations, and the ambitious drive towards regional trade