If Africa is capable of delivering the 2010 World Cup, it is also capable of building schools and clinics, Absa chief executive Maria Ramos said on Friday.
”We have the most unbelievable delivery capacity in our private sector, not just in South Africa but across this continent,” she said.
Ramos was speaking in Cape Town at the closing session of the three-day World Economic Forum on Africa.
She said leadership was about the courage to implement the projects, policies and decisions that had already been made and were ”out there”.
”We need to stay the course and in fact make more of those decisions, and … implement more of those decisions,” she said.
”The only thing that stops us doing any of this is our own imagination, our own inability to actually move beyond the theory into the actual implementation.”
There was no need for more plans or reviews.
The reason there were blockages in delivery was that not enough people were being held accountable when things were not happening.
The tone had to be set right at the top, whether in a private sector organisation or in the public sector.
”When delivery doesn’t happen, we need to fire somebody. It’s as simple as that,” she said. — Sapa