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(LUSAKATIMES) Government to resurrect KK’s Zambianisation programme

Government to resurrect KK’s Zambianisation programme
TIME PUBLISHED - Wednesday, November 30, 2011, 4:22 pm

The government has resurrected Dr Kenneth Kaunda’s 1971 Zambianisation program that aims to put locals in management positions. The Zambianisation Committee is lead by Deputy Minister of Labour Rayford Mbulu, who this morning visited Airtel, the biggest telecommunications company in the country, to inquire on the number of expatriates it has employed.

Mr Mbulu told the Airtel Managing Director Fayaz King that the Patriotic Front Government wanted to see Zambians in “decent employment” adding that it was going to focus on citizen’s empowerment and was not going to accept cheap expatriate labour.

“We are only going to accept expatriates with very rare skills that cannot be locally obtained,” Mr. Mbulu said. “Even then, they should be understudies to transfer those rare skills to locals so that those people can quickly handover to locals. That skills transfer will build capacity and will make Zambians excel.”

He then asked Airtel to submit how many employees it had, what skills existed at the company that were not locally possessed, the number of expatriates and the expected length of stay and at what point they were going to hand over theirpositions to Zambians.

In response, King disclosed that Airtel currently employed 393 locals with just four expatriate managers.

Mr King said Zambia was among the top four important investments in Africa which called for the best skills locally and across the continent.

He said it was the policy of Airtel to let its African operations run by Africans but not necessarily Zambians.

Mr King disclosed that a couple of Zambians were working in other parts of Africa and that it was important that the country also accepted staff from those countries.

He also disclosed that the biggest challenge the telecom had was staff retention as rival companies tended to poach skilled labour after the company trained them and sent them abroad for work experience.

“When our staff comes back from training or from working in our international operations, they attract a premium and the opposition gets them,” he said. “We are trying to fill all availablepositions with locals, that is in line with our policies. Our brand is unique and requires a lot of training, they are no short cuts. Unfortunately, after that training, we begin to compete with the international job market. In some instances, where you pay an engineer US$3000, they are offered US$12, 000 which makes it difficult to retain them.”

Labels: KENNETH KAUNDA, RAYFORD MBULU, ZAMBIANISATION

posted by MrK @ 7:19 PM