I PROPOSE SETTING UP OF NLIP FOR ZAMBIA

ON 11 October we featured a theoretical policy which I called the National Leadership Identification Policy (NLIP).

As we continue to give the highlights of the 2013, I revisit the article this week.

In that article which generated a lot of interest I wrote that for quite some time, I had been pondering on how best to tackle the topic and what to include or indeed what to omit, resulting in procrastination.

I said I had dragged my feet on the topic but it had kept on haunting me such that I could not just ignore it.

 

The NLIP, is a set of strategies which should be used in identifying and keeping a pool of credible citizens ready to join the national leadership at any given level, especially in the public service.

Before that Finance minister Alexander Chikwanda was quoted in the media as saying that technocrats or civil servants employed by the government to think are disappointing President Michael Sata.

Mr Chikwanda had said the technocrats who were employed to advise the government were not playing their role.

If the implementers are that vital to the success of the policies then their identification is equally paramount.

This means that my NLIP is important if we are to have a cadre of qualified citizens ready to take up the responsibilities at various levels and in various fields of public service.

By qualified citizens I do not necessary mean people with academic qualifications only but those with holistic qualifications, bearing in mind that some are natural or born-leaders while others are made.

Even those who are not educated there is a role they can play in national development!

I am aware that currently potential public workers are identified and employed by the Public Service Commission and I am sure that this is done as need arises.

With the NLIP, however, I am looking at a scenario where the policy would guide the people responsible on how to come up with a team of qualified people whose details would be saved and whenever need arises it is just a matter of going to the pool and get one name.

Apart from that the policy should be able to guide on how to “fish out” a potential leader from any part of the country and in any field to go and take up the national leadership in the public service.

On this I am not talking about political leaders because I suppose the individual political parties have their own mechanisms of how to identify potential leaders.

As I reflected on this, my mind took me to First Republican President Kenneth Kaunda’s top civil servants and how he could have managed to identify leaders at various levels of the public service.

Glancing at some of the profiles of these former public servants reveals their wide-ranging backgrounds with some of them having been hardly educated but performed extremely well.

Before they were identified they had mere leadership potential in their own light and the identification exposed them to leadership.

Some of them could - prior to their appointments - have been good headmen, teachers, like Dr Kaunda himself, kapasos (chief retainers) or indeed good managers with massive potential for national leadership.

Like an article on the Cornerstone Business Solution website indicates, leadership is a combination of inherited and acquired characteristics.

It states that even if your genes did not make you a ‘natural’ leader you can certainly learn a lot about leadership if you are called upon to lead.

Natural leaders stand out – they are easy to identify.

Identifying those that have the latent potential to become leaders is a much harder process but it’s what every leader has to do when looking for team members to carry the national vision.

I posed a question to various senior citizens I met when preparing this discussion on how Dr Kaunda’s administration managed to identify the potential leadership especially from far-flung areas, and one
common word came out, “mechanism”.

The respondents said the administration had a deliberate mechanism through which potential leaders were identified, most of the time without the candidates knowing it or lobbying.

I am told some potential leaders were followed in their fields, right in their villages while cultivating and picked to go and become leaders like district governors, through the “mechanism”.

“Look at past performance first. Who has been able to define a vision and motivate others to go with it? Who has shown the willingness to take on a challenge and enjoyed accomplishing something noteworthy? This is what leaders do,” partly reads the article by the Cornerstone Business Solution.

Therefore, as a nation we need this mechanism to be able to haul out potential leaders from villages, communities, districts or provinces, companies, churches, markets, name it for national duties.

I am mindful that the challenge now is that there are too many qualified people as compared to those days when only a few people had academic qualification what with only about 100 graduates at Independence.

Therefore, the National Leadership Identification Policy is more imperative now than then because given the high number of “qualified people” it is easy to appoint wrong ones thereby affecting policy
implementation.

For comments/other contributions call: 0955431442, 0977246099 or email: jmuyanwa@gmail.com.