Lessons from Absa’s separation from Barclays could help Botswana navigate its own public-service transformation, according to the bank’s Botswana managing director, Keabetswe Pheko-Moshagane.
Speaking at the recently held Directorate of Public Service Management leadership conference, Pheko-Moshagane drew on Absa’s experience of separating from Barclays, which required the bank to separate systems, processes, technology, operations and organizational identity from a global institution while continuing to serve millions of customers across 10 African countries.
Pheko-Moshagane said the bank had to build independent capabilities without being able to pause its existing operations: salaries still had to be credited, businesses had to make payments, ATMs had to function, regulators still expected compliance and employees needed leadership and certainty.
“There was no opportunity to close the bank while we transformed it,” she said. “We had to transform while continuing to deliver.”
She said that experience is particularly relevant to the government because public services cannot be suspended while the public service is being reformed. The government must simultaneously pursue transformation, continue delivering essential services, restore economic momentum and unlock opportunities for Batswana in a complex global and domestic environment.
“Transformation cannot become an excuse for interrupted delivery,” Pheko-Moshagane said. “We must change the engine while the vehicle is moving.”
The first lesson Pheko-Moshagane drew from the transformation was the need for clarity of purpose. Absa’s independence was not simply about separating from Barclays; it was about building an African financial institution with the capability, confidence and ambition to shape its own future. That purpose, she said, gave direction to what could otherwise have become an overwhelming collection of projects, new structures, technology changes and unfamiliar terminology.
She said the government faces the same risk when transformation becomes defined by its mechanisms rather than its intended impact. Digitizing government, restructuring ministries or reducing expenditure may be important interventions, but they are not the ultimate purpose of reform. The purpose has to be relatable and impact-driven, centered on improving citizens’ lives and strengthening Botswana’s ability to deliver prosperity.
“Every reform should therefore ultimately answer a citizen’s questions capable of answering the question: ‘What will become better for me?'” Pheko-Moshagane said.
That focus on purpose leads into the second lesson: leadership has to move from announcing change to owning delivery. Pheko-Moshagane said Absa’s transformation required senior leaders to make difficult choices, allocate resources, remove obstacles and challenge legacy practices, while remaining accountable when delivery fell short.
She warned that large organizations can become caught in what she called the “activity trap,” holding meetings, establishing committees, developing frameworks, preparing presentations and producing reports, all of which may be necessary but do not themselves constitute outcomes.
“Citizens do not experience our meetings,” she said. “Citizens experience outcomes.”
Pheko-Moshagane proposed that major government programs should therefore be tied to three questions: what outcome is being pursued, who personally owns that outcome and when citizens will experience the difference. In her view, that changes the organization’s focus from administering activity to taking responsibility for delivery.
The third lesson, according to her, is more difficult to achieve because it concerns behavior rather than systems: culture ultimately determines whether transformation succeeds. Pheko-Moshagane said Absa discovered that changing systems was easier than changing behavior, requiring deliberate work to build a culture that was more African, entrepreneurial, accountable and customer-centered.
This involved how quickly customer problems were solved, how collaboration was rewarded, how successes were celebrated, how failures were used to learn and how difficult conversations and consequence management were handled.
She said a citizen-centered public service would require similar changes in behavior. Public servants would need to move from asking what the procedure allows them to do to how they can responsibly help citizens; from treating issues as belonging to another department to making government feel like one government to citizens; and from accepting established practices to questioning whether there is a better way.
The fourth lesson follows from that cultural shift: institutions need to be designed around the people they serve rather than around their own internal structures. Pheko-Moshagane said banking customers now compare their experiences not only with other banks but with the best digital experiences they encounter anywhere, raising expectations around convenience, speed, transparency and personalization.
“Citizens are beginning to expect the same from the government and this requires a change in perspective,” she said.
Government, however, is organized around ministries, departments and agencies while citizens organize their lives around needs and life events.
“A young entrepreneur does not wake up thinking they want to interact with five government departments,” she said. “They think I want to start a business,” highlighting the difference between institution-centered and citizen-centered design.
That same principle applies to technology, which forms the fifth lesson. Pheko-Moshagane said technology was fundamental to Absa’s transformation, but the bank also learned that digitization does not automatically improve a process.
“Technology applied to a bad process can simply create a faster bad process,” she said.
The government, she said, should simplify processes before digitizing them, ensure existing platforms can communicate before building new ones and avoid asking citizens for information it already holds. The aim should be to make government increasingly digital by design, data-driven and simple by default, driving government services to be more transparent, proactive and easier to access, rather than simply moving existing bureaucracy online.
The sixth lesson is measurement. Pheko-Moshagane said financial institutions measure customer experience, turnaround times, risk, productivity and financial performance because what is consistently measured tends to receive attention.
She said public service could similarly shift its focus from inputs and activity to outcomes, from asking how much of a budget was spent to what that expenditure achieved, and from counting programs launched to asking how many citizens benefited and what changed in their lives.
She suggested that a government delivery dashboard could track a small number of citizen-facing outcomes across major services, creating a stronger link between strategy, performance and accountability.
“Data turns accountability from opinion into evidence,” she said.
For Pheko-Moshagane, the experience ultimately demonstrates that transformation cannot be delivered by technology, structures or strategies alone.
“People transform institutions,” she said, placing responsibility on public servants to consider who the citizen they serve is, what prevents them from serving that citizen better and what they can personally do differently.
She also called for greater collaboration between government and the private sector, including commercial banks, where existing capabilities could be used for national transformation.
