Things That Make Government Accountants and Auditors Perform Better in Their Job
Eight ideas — drafted by API staff to inspire your success — and change how Africa’s public finance professionals work, think, and lead.
Across Africa, every day, thousands of government accountants and auditors show up to work. They manage public money. They check if budgets were spent correctly. They report to parliaments and to citizens. Their work is not glamorous. It rarely makes headlines. But it decides whether the hospital gets its medicines, whether the teacher gets paid, and whether the road gets fixed.
At the 1st API PFM Visionary Summit in March 2026, more than 250 delegates from 31 countries gathered in Johannesburg to ask a hard question: why are so many public finance systems still failing — and what can be done about it? The answers that emerged were not complicated. They were practical, honest, and human. Corruption, weak skills, poor technology, and isolation were named as the main enemies. Professionalism, ethics, learning, and teamwork were named as the cure.
Before a single panel had spoken, Shabeer Khan — Accountant General of South Africa and Chief Guest at the Opening Ceremony — had already named what was at stake: the quality of life of millions of people in Africa rests on how well public money is managed.
What follows is a distillation of the ideas that matter most — drawn not only from the Summit, but from the minds of the greatest thinkers in history, business, and leadership. These ideas are simple enough for anyone to apply. They are powerful enough to change institutions.
1. PROTECT YOUR BEST HOURS
Not all hours are equal. Your brain is sharpest in the morning. It gets tired as the day goes on. This is not a weakness — it is biology. The best thinkers in history have always known this, and they planned their days around it.
Andy Grove built Intel into the world’s most powerful chip company by teaching his engineers to protect time for focused, uninterrupted work. Cal Newport, who wrote a book on this idea, calls it ‘deep work’: the ability to sit with a hard problem and think it through without checking your phone or answering messages. For a government auditor, deep work means doing the real analysis — reviewing financial records, writing findings, detecting patterns — during your best hours, not your leftover ones.
Think of it this way. A doctor does surgery in the morning, not at midnight. A pilot does the pre-flight check before takeoff, not during it. Government accountants should treat complex financial analysis the same way. Two focused hours in the morning are worth more than six distracted ones in the afternoon.
“The most important thing I did every day was protect time to think.” — Andy Grove
An auditor in Ghana started a simple rule: no meetings and no phone until ten o’clock. She used those first two hours to review procurement data. In three months, she caught more irregularities than she had in the previous year.