Page 109 - Afrika Must Unite

94 AFRICA MUST UNITE
of Ghana is crucial. O ur best laid plans will go awry if they are
not handled with heart as well as head.
At the moment of independence, we had several first-class
African officials who could assume the highest positions of trust
in several ministries, but there still remained many ministries
whose perm anent secretary was an expatriate. Expatriates also
continued to fill many of the high-grade key positions in the
execution of policy. Nor can I say that every African civil servant
was suited to his job. Some were good and experienced. Some
were good, but lacked training. Some were second-rate. W hen­
ever I and my cabinet colleagues sat down to formulate policy,
we always had to keep in mind the capability limits of our civil
service in the implementation of our programmes in the time
we had set.
I have come to appreciate, however, that even some of the
African staff who, to put it conservatively, were lukewarm in
their support of my government and its programme, given
responsibility, have risen to the demands made upon them. My
ministerial colleagues and I work a very full day and the pace
we set is quite gruelling. It has warmed me to see how many
members of my staff, accustomed as they were to the meander­
ing methods of the colonial administration, have stiffened their
rate of work to meet the new and urgent demands made upon
them.
Innum erable exasperations and difficulties remain, and the
more I think about this problem of the civil service in less
developed countries planning for development, the more I feel
that the leaders of freedom movements and of emergent states
must pay added attention to the need to start early in the selec­
tion and training of their future executive officers. Some coun­
tries, like India, Pakistan and Ceylon, were able to send their
sons to overseas universities to train for future leadership, and
were given the opportunity of introducing them into certain
branches of their colonial administration. They too experienced
difficulties, in spite of having a core of civil servants of their own
nationals. O ther countries, like Israel, spent the immediate years
before they achieved independence in training up a corps of
high-level officials who never actually worked in the British
administration but who studied the problems of organization