The HRD Front in Africa in the fight against COVID-19 (1)

The noose of contradictory injunctions and double constraint

Covi is a technician in a West African telecom company, subsidiary of a large group.

With this health crisis, his employer has aligned its preventive measures with those of the group, recently implemented at the European headquarters, where the pandemic is a few weeks ahead of schedule. Covi is being sensitized in his workplace, bombarded with messages, and reads all sorts of signs everywhere in his workplace. He has his temperature taken when entering and leaving the company; he has to keep a permanent distance of 1m50 from his colleagues and wash his hands at least twice when he goes to the office, now every other day and in half a day.

At 12.30 pm, Covi returns home by motorcycle taxi.

He is in his thoughts when he pushes the gate of the concession in which he lives in a 30m2 "Entré-couché" (2) with his wife, his three children, and his sick mother-in-law, on the outskirts of the city. He shares the same courtyard with five other families.

Today is market day. At this time, Awa, his wife, will soon be back from the market where she will have spent a good 2 hours talking with lots of traders, touching their products to make sure of their quality, shaking hands. Covi is tired in advance at the thought of repeating to her that all this must be avoided. On top of that, tonight they must go and pay their respects in a funeral home, to "relatives and allies"! He won't cut it. He reassures himself that they will be back before the curfew that has just been imposed.

If he sticks to what he is being serenaded all day long at the office, it is evident that the hand-to-hand contact he has just had with this motorcycle taxi is not advisable. Mainly since the said motorcycle taxi literally spoke to him in his nose for 20 minutes, and that he will probably have transported a dozen people this morning without taking the most basic precautions. He is told at work that this "Corona" story is really not to be taken lightly, but he can see that his country has not taken the strict confinement measures that television describes in France and Italy, where his cousins live. He is lost. He no longer knows what to do.

Contradictory injunction...

He wishes he could be in the head of the President of the Republic!

A few dozen kilometers away, the President of the Republic left the crisis meeting, during which experts urged him to speed up the adoption of total containment measures. "These experts truly do not understand anything about the situation and conditions in our country!" he swears. "Can they not see that I am sitting between two burning chairs?

If I entirely confine the population, they are not among that 80 % of people that we would surely starve to death. This population lives on informal work, often daily, and has to go out every day to find enough to pay for the next day's food, so it won't be long before they start protesting out in the streets! That is the last thing we need right now.

But if the pandemic spreads along the same lines as in Europe, our already inadequate health systems will not be able to do much," he says. He went over his experts' figures again and again: 7 to 9% of declared cases will be severe cases requiring health infrastructures to take care of respiratory distress for at least two weeks? It is potentially tens of thousands of deaths that we have to prepare for! Perhaps the structure of the population of our very young country will attenuate the announced hecatomb? Maybe additional measures such as partial confinement by regional clusters will make it possible to limit the damage while waiting for more convincing clinical results on the two currently identified avenues of treatment?

Perhaps they will. Maybe not...Especially since it seems that the proportion of under-60s severely affected by the virus has increased since its appearance in China and that at the African regional level, population movements are much higher than in Europe...

Like his African peers, he senses a bad wind coming, and keeps asking the question: what can we do?

Double constraint.

A double constraint is a situation in which a person is subject to 2 pressures. A double constraint is a situation in which a person is subject to two contradictory or incompatible pressures. The best-known form of double constraint is the contradictory injunction, which in psychology is akin to a "contradictory command." Contradictory injunctions, also known as paradoxical injunctions, are those that cannot be obeyed without disobeying. Hence the term "double constraint" or "double knot," theorized by Gregory Bateson. It confronts the individual with the certainty of being a loser, regardless of the choice he or she makes: reacting with a partial response to each of the two injunctions or taking refuge in tetany by not responding to any of the constraints.

Typically, the measures for setting up containment AND continuing economic activity are of the order of double, contradictory injunctions, complex at best in their implementation, incomprehensible at worst  ...

Liability, an antidote to paradoxical injunction

Almost all of the 11 HRDs, General Counsel and General Secretary of regional groups and subsidiaries of multinationals in sub-Saharan Africa I questioned before drafting this article (1), praise the speed, vigor, and relevance of the adjustments of the majority of governments in sub-Saharan African countries where they work. They all say that governments' communication and information is useful. Daily updates on the situation are now the norm. This must be recognized. Those of them who had been involved for weeks with teams in their European, Middle Eastern, or Asian headquarters where the epidemic had "matured," however, note that this adaptation is very recent. We had an advance on which we did not capitalize sufficiently.

In reality, it was indeed difficult not to react: WHO projections had already indicated for some time that the epicenter of the pandemic would slide rapidly and massively towards Africa. After some prevarication, with the notable exception of Morocco, which took action very early on, governments perceived the seriousness of the situation and seemed to be in battle order.

It is here that a second percentage speaks for itself: a little less than half of the people questioned believe that the situation will deteriorate rapidly. They also think that although governments' reaction has been vigorous (information, budget release, etc.), the decisions and measures taken lack an operational relay. There should be a broader association of opinion leaders, NGOs, and the "empowerment" of local governments in controlling all these social constants, which are part of our customs and habits and which could be vectors for the explosion of contagion. I am talking, for example, about the exemplary severity required against such and such official or member of government who, infected with the coronavirus, is photographed with a large group of people who came to visit him.

This lack of operational relay also worries businesses.

One of my interlocutors indicated (he was the only one, but I take this idea on board, as I share it) that he thought that governments had covered up, but had not fully assumed their responsibility.

He continued: "Responsibility is also the ability to give an answer or to make people capable of giving a relevant answer. I mean, when you're a leader, being responsible means making sure that what you ask for is possible and reasonably feasible. If that is not the case, you have to look for another way of doing things, one that is more effective and less dangerous. Similarly, when you receive orders, being responsible means making sure that you can do what is asked of you. The how and the means are at least as important as the direction. ?

The point is not to ask to take a definitive and public stand for one or the other option. The introductory narrative shows the dilemma in which the leader in Africa finds himself. Here, even more than elsewhere, there is no simple solution!

However, if I only consider the preventive measures and framework documents produced by most governments for businesses, specifically for formal Small and Medium Enterprises, and the fragile economic sectors of our countries, the full responsibility would have been, for example, to set up permanent operational units to support these destitute and isolated SMEs. For the vast majority of them, the implementation of these "macro" guidelines is a dramatic reality.

Several HRDs told me that governments had not imposed any particular and specific measures on employers provided that the injunction to stay at home as much as possible is applicable to everyone). Each company is putting in place its response to the current situation, in the context of a state of emergency with curfews in several of the countries they cover.

Responsibility is a double-take stick, as this other HRD told me. If the authorities and governments do what they can, what these interviews and questionnaires administered showed me is that individuals have proved to be extraordinary relays of solidarity in the business world...

Continue reading this survey summary on my website and find out relays of solidarity among Human Resources Directors that were created and the way in which the crisis also revealed talents.

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(1) I wrote this article thanks to interviews and questionnaires in which 11 HRDs and 1 General Counsel and General Secretary of regional groups and subsidiaries of multinationals in sub-Saharan Africa spontaneously agreed to participate. They come from the following sectors: telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, energy, fintech, agri-food, in regional functions and based in Senegal, Benin, Togo C?te d'Ivoire, Kenya, Ghana.

I would like to thank them once again for their availability in these difficult times, motivated by their willingness to share.

This article does not pretend to be a study, and is probably not representative of the whole reality of the African continent! On the occasion of my collection of incomplete information, I simply had the privilege of being able to take the pulse of a situation, a partial cliché, which I wished to be able to restitute so that it could be useful.

(2) "Entré-couché": A type of accommodation similar to a small studio apartment, on the ground floor, in West Africa, Benin, and Togo, in particular, where a whole family can live.