THERE IS A MAP FOR YOU, MR PRESIDENT
Hon.Mutotwe Kafwaya wrote;
I must admit that I am partial to leadership advice from people who are either doing it or have done it before. And I would not commit this to paper if I didn’t experience it. That is perhaps the reason I am more inclined to listening to ECL more than anyone living in Zambia today on the subject of leadership.
And so I arrived in Ambleside with a friend of mine. We were in a second degree residence class. There we found a lot of other international students who arrived from various parts of the world. And just to be truthful, we were late by over an hour on our first day because we got lost the previous evening. Instead of heading straight to Ambleside, we strayed into Lancaster and spent a night there at the old station B&B.
And in the morning of our first day, we travelled on a metered taxi to our destination. £40 wasn’t much for the two of us. As we arrived in an impeccably organized class, the first thing that wise professor asked each one of us was to stick a pin on our respective hometowns on a map stuck on the wall.
So I searched for Zambia, then found northern province, I could see Mporokoso but couldn’t find Kapatu Mission and later on Kafwayas Village. But I stuck my pin somewhere there. We all did the same. At the time I didn’t have a good phone to take a clear image of the pinned map. But I can be honest and say the map had pins all around.
As we progressed in our studies, the professor continued to remind us that culture was important, but diversity had come to stay. “Adaptation and agility was key to survival in fast paced world. Embrace people from a diverse of cultures and accept their diversity. If you doubt, looked at the pinned map. All the cultures represented on it by all those pins will have a graduate with skills offered in this course if they did well.” The professor told us. Of course I did graduated.
This is a map I’d like to bring to our state house today. And I will simplify it by removing all other countries of the world but Zambia and it’s provinces and districts. Then ask each of the people serving at state house including the president that they should stick a pin on where the come from. Then the president would get a sense of diversity at his work station.
Can we do the same for all the people benched at cabinet office in holding position. What about permanent secretaries, parastatal heads and directors? If we wish we could also do the same for all new recruits in the defense forces, secret service and Zambia police service.
If the pins spread out evenly across the districts of our Republic, then we could be proud of our belief in diversity and we would speak about national unity without thinking of ourselves as hypocrites.
This is a practical assessment tool which I could use in my leadership inquiry on this subject. I learned it from a professor who knows, and I do think that it works.
Happy Sabbath.
Restoring EVERYTHING PATRIOTIC.
MK27.07.2024
I think this is a wonderful idea, to even make it a better comparison, let’s have 2 maps, one for the current UPND government and one for the previous government of PF.
This will be a good indicator of progress or lack of progress?
@justice, I echo your thoughts. Kafwaya is good at seeing the speck in the eye of the current government but he is conveniently blind to the log in the eye of the immediate past regime. If he is bold enough let him produce the PF regime appointments map.
Where was this gentleman to offer such advice now at the time of PF rule? We have seen how critical he is with the current government but had kept quiet and silent in the PF era.
He is a hard-core PF cadre. I hear he was in President Lungu’s cabinet.
I can’t say it any better than what others have observed and said. We encourage the learned honorable to go ahead and do it for both regimes and then publish it in parliament and on social media. This will be quite informative and therefore, sincerely thank the honorable for bringing it up.
Zambians are the only people in Africa who don’t know how their tribes have uniform traditions.Ask Nigerians. Zambians have taken sibling rivalry too far.The tool is useful.
Diversity is becoming an interesting field of inquiry in social science these days. This is because of the fact that there has been a tendency for conflict to start because of failure to handle or manage diversity or for people to fear or stereotype those who are different. Mutotwe Kafwaya seems to be interested in diversity but only if it supports his political goals. I would advise him to also examine the issue of diversity of language in Zambia. Does the picture that appears please him? There’s a term in social science to describe language discrimination and it’s called language chauvinism. In Zambia, there’s a tendency to think that language chauvinism is the same as tribalism. They are not the same thing but what is of concern to social scientists is that they are both vices and neither is acceptable.
Diversity has actually been studied by mathematians and natural scientists such as biologists, doctors for many years now. Statistics is the branch of mathematics used to study diversity. Social scientists have also become interested in studying diversity because of the need to manage it so that it should not lead to conflict, discrimination, tension or anything negative.