Lamentations from a journalist

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.