Sometimes
securing an audience with a government official can prove more difficult than
getting an assurance from God that you will live another day. One excuse is how
busy they are; they will often claim they can only meet you “next week.” This
is unhelpful when the story is urgent.
When they’re in
opposition, they are buddies, pals, and friends – whatever term you may call
them. But give them a chance to run your affairs and try to give them a call, they simply
will never pick up your calls. When you’re lucky, which is not normally the
case, they will give you all sorts of excuses – bring a letter on a headed
paper or the Permanent Secretary is busy, so many excuses. Of course a few will
respond or make an effort to call back when they find a missed call, the
majority would not bother. They will only call you when they have a statement
to issue and no questions asked. What they forget is that in trying to answer
what they think are questions from the people their answers end up creating more
questions.
I am talking about our
politicians and civil servants. The people we have trusted to run the affairs
of the country on our behalf. It is important to note that those are not your
personal to holder positions, they’re not your farms or your homes – they’re
public offices and anyone should walk in at any time to check what you’re doing
on our behalf. Of course not anyone because there will be uncontrolled traffic
to those offices. The people of Zambia and anywhere in the world have their mates
in the name of journalists to perform this function on their behalf. The
journalists would in turn pass on this information to the public in order for
them to know what is happening.
Contrary to the above
assertion, our politicians who are supposed to be our servants have turned
masters and are dictating what should be asked or told to the people. They have
invented excuses whenever you visit them. It is either you meet a tired
secretary who shows no concern or at least care enough to schedule appointments
with her boss or you will be told to put it in written and drop a hard copy.
The questions that I have no answers to are:- Where do you keep the piles and
piles of paper that you receive everyday in your offices? When are you going to
at least embrace new technology and begin to demand for soft scanned and signed
letters? Why is our public service so stack in the past? What I have learnt through
my experiences is that you do not even respond to those letters.
There is a bit of light
coming from above though. I was encouraged when in one of my interactions with
the Secretary to the Cabinet, Dr. Roland Msiska to note that he is forward
thinking man who wants this government to be transformed into an e-powered one.
In his words he said: “A smart government
is a government which can clearly use ICT (Information and Communication
Technology) and the people in such an efficient manner
that most of the documents should be on the internet. For example, you should
by the time you’re coming if we had our portal running which is now being
tested – our government portal. You should have gotten a lot of documents and
things we are talking about already so that by the time you are coming you
should have just been asking me to explain things that you were not clear about
in the documents. We are heading there as well. We are talking about an
e-government system that will look at government to government communication,
government to business communications."
Clearly this is what
this country needs because that is a quick and easy direction every serious
nation is taking. But is it possible under the current system of governance and
type of leaders occupying those offices? This is a conundrum Dr. Msiska and his
colleagues at cabinet office have to deal with. Facebook pages, twitter accounts,
are they not good platforms to communicate and connect with the masses, you may
ask. Yes, they’re but they don’t give an opportunity to ask questions and get right
answers. They are after all not owned and managed by leaders except for a few
exceptions. They are managed by young and energetic henchmen surrounding these
leaders. I doubt if the leaders even know what is posted on these so called
their facebook pages because they don’t own them.
Zambia is in urgent
need of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, which would in a way, hopefully,
open up this government and other private institutions to proper media
scrutiny. It will be a bit difficult
even with the FOI in place but it is a move in the right direction. Many
serious democracies have done so and results of having one can also enhance the
fight against corruption.
