Maravi

LETTERS - Chiefs, Unemployment, Effects of Corruption

Chiefs' role in governance
By Chief Bright Nalubamba
Friday April 06, 2007 [04:00]

I have visited many Royal Chiefdoms throughout the country in my capacity as Chairman of the Royal Foundation of Zambia. The impression I have about their efforts and initiatives in the governance and development process completely differs from yours. I do not know when you last visited your village to share development and governance ideas with your chief.

There are quite a number of chiefdom structures I visited throughout the country that are doing a commendable job in governance and development process. If they have not done as much as you expect, it’s not totally their fault. It is lack of government appreciation and support to these noble efforts.

The government needs to take radical steps, through workshops and seminars designed to sharpen chiefdom structures as instruments for good governance and development in rural societies.

Unfortunately, the government has left these structures below the district level to fend for themselves. This explains a dire need for an effective decentralised system that will provide needed ability and positive attitude to these chiefdom structures in order for these structures to perform well and deliver.

Have you in the last 20 years heard of any workshops on leadership, project cycle or strategic planning for traditional leaders? Don’t we deserve these and many other knowledge and information workshops to prepare us for good performance and delivery?

I am convinced that given proper direction and support, our chiefdom structures you so much doubt and condemn can do a lot to bring about change because that is where you find the most important development resource – the people.

Are you sure editor, you have not seen traditional leaders in this age and time who have spent 80 per cent of their time living and sleeping with their subjects in villages with no thought of personal comfort just to share governance and development ideas? Then your knowledge of rural areas is not thorough.

For all these efforts, traditional leaders (save the MPs) do not deserve consideration for duty-free vehicles to facilitate their regular visits to the villagers.

They should be condemned to walking through the villages; and be condemned to dilapidated so-called palaces. What a negative way to look at the plight of traditional leaders. You do not call this an insult to the traditional leaders. I refuse to share that view with you.

Lastly, even when I totally disagree with you on this editorial, I totally love you because unlike half-cooked politicians, you have profound love for critics because you consider them a great source of inspiration.

But, don’t criticise us from a distance, come closer to the efforts of traditional leaders. I invite you to NAMUCHI – July Congress to be held in Mbeza-Namwala for you to criticise or commend us better. Traditional leaders are trying but they lack support from the government.







http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=24893

Effects of corruption
By M.W. Mbiritengerenji
Saturday April 07, 2007 [04:00]

Corruption reduces domestic and foreign investments, lowers tax revenue, and by skewing the composition of public expenditure away from social services that are important to the poor, worsens income distribution and diverts resources from poverty reduction. Misgovernance and corruption have increased the fragility of financial sectors.

Corruption may also reduce tax revenue because it compromises the government’s ability to collect taxes, and tariffs, although the net effect depends on how the nominal tax rate and other regulatory burdens were chosen by corruption-prone officials.

It is an established fact that where corruption prevails, the poor face higher taxes and receive lower levels of social services; infrastructure investments are biased against projects that aid the poor; and the ability to escape poverty using small-scale entrepreneurial means is impaired.

Contributing factors: Political rights (democratic elections, a legislature, and opposition parties) and civil liberties (free and independent media, freedom of assembly, and freedom of speech) are relatively correlated with corruption. With the correlations somewhat stronger for civil liberties.

Policy distortions and controls, state ownership, excessive regulation of business, arbitrary application of regulations, heavy trade restrictions, protectionist and anti-competition measures are associated with high incidence of corruption. So is monopolisation within economies.

Civil service, professionalism, as manifested in training, hiring and promoting systems, is negatively associated with corruption.

The evidence on civil service pay is more ambiguous; the less robust relationship suggests that salary alone is not the answer in the fight against corruption. Salary corrections need to be combined with meritocratic recruitment and promotion and the creation of a professional cadre of civil servants.

Income per capita and education, holding other factors constant, are negatively correlated with corruption.

Responses to corruption- What kind of anticorruption programme is likely to have the greatest impact?

We know the elements of such a programme: an independent judiciary, rule of law, good institutional and public sector management, strong political and civil liberties, oversight and involvement by civil society, deregulation, tax and budgetary reforms, financial and procurement reforms.

It is a known fact that civil liberties, participation and institutional capacity are important for protection against corruption and for the achievement of broadly based development.





http://www.postzambia.com/post-read_article.php?articleId=24890

Lack of employment
By Fr Derrick M Muwina
Saturday April 07, 2007 [04:00]

My thoughts on the issues involved in the debate on retirement are these; first most of us are of the impression that politicians such as ministers are civil servants.

As a result, we get disturbed when we see personalities who have been in leadership in all three governments and republics and wonder why they have not retired.

That is an issue on its own and it must not be mixed with retirement of civil servants.

Second, we are mixing the lack of employment with retiring people early as the solution. Anthropologists will agree that humans often find a "scapegoat" to problems. The main issue is lack of employment which our government is hugely responsible for.

How come we talk about "brain drain" when we have plenty unemployed graduates? We claim to have a free market or liberalised economy when even the highly industrialised countries control their economies more than we do.

Third we seem to think that once someone is out of employment we have solved the problem, some young person will jump in and all will be well. No wonder we have been committing such an injustice to our parents. One of the huge expenditures of highly industrialised countries goes to the maintenance of retired citizens.

Retired citizens by right must first of all receive a good pension, not the miserable peanuts we pay people in Zambia, have access to medical services, good pension allowances, reduced fares on buses and such other services.

In Zambia we seem totally ignorant of such issues and so when we advocate early retirement, we think we will solve a problem.

No, we would not have solved a problem but thrown out energetic people with experience and consequently put the burden on the younger working people. If a woman or man was to retire at forty five and let us say theoretically they have children, how old are the children going to be?

At most the oldest will be twenty and the youngest maybe ten.

What this means is that their children cannot contribute to the support of senior citizens through the paying of Pay As You Earn since they will be in college and requiring financial help from their parents.

The larger the retiree pool the more responsibility there is on the younger working generation.

That is the fear in Germany and most of Europe right now, fewer younger people go to work to support the needs of the senior generations who are more.

But because in Zambia we think a retired parent does not by right deserve medical insurance etc, we are quick to say retire them at forty five.

In fact what is the mean age of most of our graduates? How many years are they going to work even if we retired their parents? We need to think critically people.

Cambridge

Labels: CHIEFS

posted by MrK @ 5:23 AM