Is it a change factor or ill practices in African Business

As the world shrink, the business practices have to go under radical transformation for companies to remain profitable. In today's world the fundamental practice of pleasing the shareholders have lost value if the business want to remain relevant. The customer has become the most important element to business success. Therefore many scholars now suggest that the customer should now be the pivot for any business operations. Research institutes like McKinsey have outlined that there is need for organization to satisfy the customer for them to achieve the overall objective.

This have been necessitated by the growth of the Internet and its adoption to operations of different organizations. The availability of multi sources of information pertaining to varies products online and review by other customers have resulted  in making the customer know more about products being offered. Hendrick & Struggles argued that the emerging of an interconnectivity defines the characteristics of this era. Some scholars have dubbed the era as the information age, which can be translated to people have more access to information which makes them kings and queens for any organization. This era also brought about some changes in a lot organizations.

Disruptive Technology and improvement in some technology has forced organization to have flexible organizational structures as a means to adopt to the rapid changes. Looking at Africa, some of the countries have realize the need to able to embrace changes (South Africa etc.). However, a majority are still lagging behind due to varies problems like corruption, poor governance, rigid corporate culture (mainly found in government controlled companies), and poor financial and resources planning. This aspect can be highly associated with Zimbabwe, where most CEOs that worked for parastatals were taking home huge bonuses and remunerations for themselves in none performing entities. Some even went to looting of company’s capital so as to enrich themselves will forgoing the development of the business as whole (Air Zimbabwe, NOCZIM, ZIMASCO etc.).

Herald of 11 April 2015, had a story of the Air Zimbabwe bigwigs that were sentenced to 20 years in jail after it was discovered that the they looted money from the organization  for about 10 million for  the period of 2009 to 2013 in an insurance scandal. Financial Gazette of 22 October 2010, had a story of NOCZIM having purchased vehicles in a move to bribe officials so that the audit that they had gone under not to be published because of the financial irregularities that was surrounding the organization. In both case the management were responsible for the poor performance of their respective organization because they let agreed and selfishness get in the way of running a successful business as they thought they could control the implications of their actions.

This practise have erode the very fundamental that lobs the whole economic sector of a nation. The society have embraced  this practise as normal, this could be outlined with what our uniformed force were doing (where you find policemen spending more than three quarters of their time harassing drivers rather than attending crime scenes and solving cases).