User:Yamba Think Tank/sandbox

1....Of Anchor Tenants and National Economic Development I was listening to an old rumba song called “Inchallah”, by Koffi Olomide. On the fiftieth replay (that’s how I listen to music) I wondered: who actually was singing the song—Koffi Olomide or the ten or so musicians in there? Truth be told Olomide simply threw in a name here or a praise there and then put in a mere five or six seconds of his own at the end of the song. But did it matter. He was the singer (at least the album say so) and he probably got the money and paid the rest of the guys their petty shares. Without Olomide, those guys and the song, would have been a flop. In neo-modernist terms, Koffi is the selling point. Olomide is the ANCHOR! Yet, here we are. What is our “national development anchor” in this country? Nearly fifty years after the British left, what is our “Koffi Olomide” in the song of our national economic development? The British—with their anchor defined over 400 years earlier—left our shores at the tail end of their colonial song. But in 1964—as a new nation with a generation of political leadership from their independent movements or revolution sought nation building and defined a certain type of their own anchor (J. Y. Lin & M. Liu, 2003, p. 9). Otherwise we would have remained at the tail ends of the departing British system. And intimations argue: we actual became a neo-colonial vassal because the anchors were ill defined. Apologists also disagree with my appraisal. In this country, we created our own National Development Corporation and tasked it with statutory powers to invest in industry and businesses to support our national economic development process. We even borrowed Rostow’s “The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto” (1960) for appropriate developmental pegging. As if not enough—maybe due to limited resources and smallness of our internal markets—insisted that only one firm (mostly a branch of an MNE)—would be allowed to operate in the country; even to the exclusion of local investors who tried to compete against these foreign MNE. But, the Communists, the Chinese and the whole lot of us probably did what (J. Y. Lin & M. Liu: 2003) now calls investment in SOE (state operated enterprises) that were CAD—competitive advantage defying enterprises; they were nonviable enterprises in open, competitive markets because they violated their local economy’s comparative advantages. Here, according to Lin (2003), viability is defined in respect to expected profit of a firm in an open, free, and competitive market. These were unviable firms that could not earn, even with normal management, a socially acceptable profit. They became tax-sucking vampires and thus hardly worth the name national development “anchors”. Unfortunately, the term “anchor” is a neo-classical term and elusive to African definition. As a result, not many care bother with its touchy nature. And I’m not a ‘charcoal eating” economist or evangelist either. In fact, I only came across the term “anchor” during my days in diaspora while working in a seaport (though in reality it had been discussed, earlier in the 80s albeit in passing, during my training as a physical planner). So, back then I had been unable to link its essentiality to national development. But in the seaport, as we over a number of years, became hemmed in by affluent citizens who, in turn, demanded the port, rather than them, move out of the built area the term “anchor” reappeared. After much internal soul searching—because the rich people actually followed the port to become rich—we eventually acceded and agreed to relocate some thirty kilometers away, onto a green site, to develop a deep sea port that would enable us to compete with Mauritian ports now practically anchoring ships out at sea and thus taking in larger and larger ships at our expense. However, building a new port—just like building a new shopping center or nation—is not as simple as putting up the necessary infrastructure and waiting for the customers to come. That has been the story around the competitive advantage defying imbroglio from Russia to the banana states; such that they gave in easily to neo-classical privatization under the Washington Consensus doctrine. Factories—even if they churn outputs by the earful—mean nothing if those products are of poor quality and have no customers. Put another way, building a modern shopping complex is not a mechanical process. Similarly, State Development Corporations were anything but beautiful “shopping malls” without anchor tenants or planting in minor tenants and confusing them for anchor tenants. In the fifties—when shopping malls became the craze in the West—these malls became transient centers: unable to survive because they did not have “anchor tenants”. In other words, it’s not state development corporations but what you use them to create value that keeps the lights on as long as possible while other and lesser tenants come and go. Thus, next time you visit your shopping mall look around for that “anchor tenant”. He gets all the respect that all the other tenants do not. He even ends up—willingly or otherwise—giving his name to the shopping complex. There are three characteristics of a “neo-classical” developmental anchor. I insist on using the “neo-classical” qualifier here because in African and neo-modernist economics we need to abandon, at least for now, such approaches to economic development if we are to truly transform our economies. First out is the Washington Consensus; as J. Y. Lin & M. Liu: 2003 insist. They do not reject the Consensus out of hand. But believes it should be allowed in only after you have rid yourself of the 60s—competitive advantage defying mentality to your national economic development ways. Instead, you should adopt CAF—competitive advantage following—strategies to developing and installing your anchor tenants (J. Y. Lin & M. Liu: 2003). Put simply, you need industries and/or competencies that respond to the VRIO—Value, Rarity, Inimitability and Organizational framework (Johnson, Scholes, Whittington, Angwin and Regnér: 2017) in picking your anchor tenant. By definition, an “anchor” player must be ready to come to the play. That’s what we had to do at the port; go around the world looking for the big guy ready to play. And they play hard to get. This is not to say you may not find an anchor already in situ. Most countries found their “anchors” of sorts already in place at political independence. A gold mine here and a silver-something there. Lin (2003) includes natural resources besides relative abundances of labor and capital as part of key factors of an endowment structure required in an economy and these can be used to develop one’s anchor strategy upon. But for those not so well endowed and those wary that mines are transient (they go after sometime) there is need to find something with a more solid foundation or staying power. It has sufficiently dawned on the Saudis that oil cannot be a developmental anchor hence they are now seeking other competences and even prepared to lock up their oil reserves if this threatens to detract from their quest of veritable developmental anchors. The second definition is what early shopping malls in the West learned in the 50s the hard way. You may find an “anchor” but he ends up being the first—for various reasons—to vacate. Big players—Pick-’n-Pay or Walmart—are not wont to stay if conditions are not conducive to their economic requirements. In reality, you have to ensure your anchor is intransient. He has to be steady, settled or, at a push, you have to make him stay. Unfortunately, you cannot physically nail him down. Indeed, once non-renewables underneath the ground are gone (that’s the problem with a gold mines) you cannot force a gold mine or an oil well to keep on producing. Currently, they are increasingly sifting gold dust out of the hills they once carelessly built around Johannesburg in South Africa because the gold seams beneath gave up a long time ago. Generally, shopping malls found anchor tenants leaving because they had underestimated the business potential of an area. Therefore, in seeking a secure anchor tenant, it is incumbent on you to lead the process of number crunching. This is because it is your shopping mall—not the anchor tenant’s business—that is going to remain vacant if the current tenant decides to leave. In Malawi—with the full knowledge that uranium, nuclear power stations and nuclear bombs are anathema to international development—dubious licenses were offered to Australians to harvest yellow cake from Karonga in the north. Hardly, did two years pass before the Australians left or sent packing, probably by the Americans (as part of geopolitics) and the Malawian President then died, in mid-term, under difficult-to-publicly-explain circumstances. The third definition comes under the rubric: aptitude on the part of your anchor tenant. There is nothing you cannot do if your so called anchor tenant turns out a fickle bastard. Therefore, you have to learn to coddle him; give him the little niceties he demands and sometimes takes without even demanding.