Maravi

Leadership failure

Leadership failure
Written by Editor

There are so many questions that need to be answered concerning the way the affairs of this country are being managed.It’s unfortunate that with so many issues requiring attention from national leaders, there does not seem to be any meaningful concern about what is happening in the country.

As we have been saying over the last few days, there is paralysis in the public sector. Strikes have crippled many of our public services and yet Rupiah Banda and his friends are maintaining very conspicuous silence.

There is no meaningful leadership being provided on these issues. As for Rupiah, it seems he lives and works in the air and only comes to Zambia for holiday. We say this because it does not make any sense for a responsible president of a country to be gallivanting all over the place when the public services in this country have ground to a halt.

People are dying because they cannot access medical services due to strikes. Pupils are out of school because their teachers are on strike. How can it be right for a president to be anywhere else but his home to attend to these pressing needs?

Just the other day, we observed that when both Ndola Central Hospital and Kitwe Central Hospital were ground to a halt due to strikes, Rupiah found it fitting and proper to go to Chililabombwe to watch a football match. We thought that that was bad enough, but now at a time when none of these problems have been solved, Rupiah is all over the place attending to issues that are neither pressing nor exclusively his domain.

If he was concerned about what is going on in the country, he could easily delegate and allow other colleagues of his to attend to those matters while he is addressing the problems at home.

We are not surprised by Rupiah’s conduct. There seems to be a crippling inability to concentrate on serious matters in the way Rupiah works, or rather does not work. If any of us employed a worker in our tuntembas or homes who behaved like Rupiah, we would fire them without hesitation.

A worker who leaves a crisis at his work station, claiming to be attending to some other less important issues where there is a travel and some other allowances, would be rightly called all sorts of names. In the culture of our Bemba-speaking people, when you visit someone and find that they are sick, you don’t leave until they are well or else they are otherwise very well looked after. Responsibility demands that when you find such a crisis, you don’t run away.

But even such common sense seems to be eluding Rupiah. He is all over the place doing what only he knows having a good time and not attending to the many issues. And when he tries to speak on these issues, it is in a trivialising manner, fulfilling short-term egos. But he is forgetting that you can’t play politics with people’s lives – people’s jobs and with people’s services.

There is growing anger in this country at the failure of leadership, but strangely, that anger is mixed with despair, a feeling that the problems are just too great, too complex, to be dealt with by these leaders. We disagree with it, we contend it.

We believe rational alternatives exist. If our responses to that despair, growing anger and confusion amounts to little more than slogans, if we give the impression to the Zambian people that we believe we can just make a loud noise and Rupiah’s walls of Jericho will fall down, he is not going to treat us very seriously at all – and we won’t deserve to be treated very seriously.

The people will not, cannot, abide posturing. They cannot respect leaders who do nothing but posture. There are serious problems in our country and clearly, Rupiah does not have the solutions. If he did, he would be so busy that 24 hours would not be enough to accomplish the tasks for the day. Our people need hope. They need to feel that the problems that they face can and will be solved.

While we are dealing with the crisis in the public sector, we also have a looming crisis in the energy sector. We are being told that we are likely to have fuel shortages because Indeni has not been able to procure the necessary feedstock that the country needs. Again, this is a crisis that requires leadership and level-headed management. But can we expect this from Rupiah?

Not long ago, we informed the nation that there was manipulation around tenders for the supply of diesel to the nation. This manipulation was connected to State House. This is all that the Rupiah government seems to know – how to get contracts for their friends or associates. This kind of mindset is not possible to deal with the many challenges that our country faces.

The problems that we have in the procurement of fuel are not new. This sector has been abused for a very long time. Frederick Chiluba’s regime abused this sector systematically for a very long time. They got all sorts of payments and commissions from the so-called suppliers who were mere middlemen positioned to protect their interests. Chiluba knows we know what he was doing in the fuel area. Levy Mwanawasa does not seem to have managed to clean up this sector either.

And now we have Rupiah who is not doing any better. Fuel is an important commodity for the running of the economy. In a very significant way, it determines the vitality of the whole economy. Expensive fuel is a taxation on all of us, on the whole economy because it ultimately makes all the goods and services in the country more expensive than they should be. The cost of fuel has the potential of grinding the whole economy to halt. This is why some imperialist countries are prepared to go to war, to attack other nations to simply secure the stability of their oil supplies and prices.

The price at which we get our fuel or oil is therefore so important that a serious politician cannot make the whole nation contribute to the commission of his friends or associates. At the moment, for every litre of fuel we buy, a certain amount of it goes to unnecessary middlemen. And every successive government seems to want to employ its own middlemen.

Only a serious person who is truly committed to the interests of the people can solve these problems. Judging by his conduct, we should not expect Rupiah to sort out these problems for us. We should brace ourselves for difficult times ahead. We have a driver who is asleep at the wheel. And what is worse is that he does not even seem to care what the consequences are.

If Rupiah cared, his government would be trying to find ways of reducing the cost of fuel to our country. There are many questions that need to be asked regarding the way that this sector has been managed. We have been told that we have some of the most expensive fuel in the region, if not in the world.

At certain times, we have been told that we have oil that is more expensive than what was being sold in the Congo which was at war with no refinery. These are serious problems that require serious solutions.

For years, we have been importing the comingled type of crude oil which is separated at Indeni – not refined as we claim. What is the benefit of this? Can somebody explain this to us? We ask this question because the oil-producing countries produce crude oil which is later refined into petrol, diesel, kerosene and other products.

After it is refined, somebody takes it and mingles it – mixes petrol, diesel, kerosene and other products and sends it to Zambia where we claim to refine the product which was already refined. We are not experts in this field but there is something which does not make sense here. The only sense it makes is that somehow somewhere, someone is benefitting, is making a gain. We cannot live with such a nonsensical system for so many years without getting to the bottom of it.

We know that Rupiah will be quick to say ‘this is not my problem, I inherited it’. Yes, you inherited it, that is why it is your problem. What you inherit becomes yours and no one else’s. As President, Rupiah needs to be sorting out these problems in an honest and sincere fashion.

We have said this before that if Rupiah today made a decision that he is only going to do those things that are in the interest of the people, he will be surprised that the number of problems he has will reduce dramatically. We are not saying that he won’t be misunderstood, that he won’t be criticised, but at least he would be able to explain honestly.

With all these problems at home, what is Rupiah doing gallivanting all over the place?

As for the strikes, they are painful remedies but sometimes they are the only remedies for the workers to get a hearing, to get some remedy. Nothing that they have attained was granted to them graciously. Anything they have attained was granted to them only after a grueling fight, after strikes. The Zambian worker knows he has to fight, he has to keep up a constant fight in order to obtain some small benefit in this economic order. He has to fight so that his most elemental right would be respected. But as we know in any fight, there are casualties, there are losses. The difficulties that our people are forced to endure as a result of strikes at our hospitals should not be blamed on the poor workers, they should be blamed on Rupiah and his colleagues. Rupiah and his colleagues need to address the causes of these strikes.

Labels: RUPIAH BANDA

posted by MrK @ 11:49 AM