GE: Africa needs “the best intellectual horsepower”

Have you struggled in terms of recruitment, as you’ve expanded quite rapidly even in terms of numbers of people working for GE in Africa?

 One of the things I’ve done on this trip is visit South Africa, Ghana and now Nigeria, and I’ve met with groups of GE employees at every stop. I meet government, I meet customers and I try to always engage with our employees.

I see more bigger and better people. I’m talking about commercial people, about finance people, about lawyers. The calibre of the people that we’re finding, in some cases hiring from the universities, in some cases bringing in them in mid career and in some cases bringing them back from other countries, the calibre is so encouraging, we’re finding really good people. I don’t worry about that, I worry about having enough of them, because we have big requirements but our ability to get good people is firmly reinforced.

Are some of your contracts conditional on local content and utilising local suppliers?

Most of them. Increasingly, it’s not just in buying nuts and bolts and screws from a local supplier but building a supply chain with really world-class competencies. When we invested in the Calabar facility and broke ground at the end of June last year, our commitment was to develop a supply chain of small and medium-sized enterprises that could support us and support other companies. That’s a lot bigger idea than just local content.

In the old days, local content was a math exercise, if you built something worth X, some percentage of X had to be purchased locally, it could be a service, it could be cleaning supplies.

In today’s world, there’s an expectation that you’re going to build capacity and that requires you to do a lot more than buy stuff locally; now you’re talking about training and developing small and medium-sized businesses to do what you want them to do.

One of our partners here is Aliko Dangote and his success is a function of the fact that he’s very good at what he does. He employs very good people, they are very tough negotiators and they expect world-class capability from us here.

If we’re going to be making products for them in Calabar because it’s in Nigeria and not some other place, they expect us to deliver the best. So when we look at what we do in Calabar and the people that we have to do it, and the supply chain that supports it, it’s got to be best in class.

So that has to be our expectation – and that’s a far cry from the old meaning of local content. Sometimes it’s expressed that way but really it’s a much bigger idea and much more meaningful for the country.

The Chinese Premier in his address at the World Economic Forum gave some mind-blowing statistics in terms of the assistance they would be providing to African partners. How can you compete with the Chinese model, with their concession loans, grants, turnkey solutions?

I don’t think we compete with the Chinese model, we accept the Chinese model for what it is and that’s something that could be very good for Africa and the people of Africa. 

I think we can be part of that because we have technology and capabilities that can be complementary to what the Chinese do. I don’t think it’s the Chinese versus us or versus Western Europe or versus the US in Africa, I think that there’s room for everybody.