What has necessitated this article is my observation of a trend that has become endemic to our culture.

Whenever the president appoints someone to any position, it is always viewed primarily as a favour to that person; and sometimes even to that man's ethnic group, and so on. This is why there is all this talk about tribalism and nepotism in presidential appointments. It is simply because everyone, including the president himself, seems to think that a job is something you give to someone as a favour. It is not only the president who is guilty of this misunderstanding, but his critics as well (the opposition). The manner in which they proffer their criticism shows that they too are submerged in this mistaken paradigm.

A very urgent paradigm shift needs to happen in our culture, and it needs to happen very quickly. We need to start thinking of a job not as something one has but rather something one does. This change in mind will create a radical change in performance of duties and the rate of delivery. The appointing authorities will no longer give certain jobs to people whom they owe some sort of favour for what they did for them either during the campaign period or (worse) while they were growing up! They will only look for those who can DO the job, not those who should HAVE it.

The opposition will also stop making their demands of "sharing the national cake" in this context, an expression which blatantly betrays their own ignorance and attitude. To give someone a job is not to give them a piece of the "cake". The natural use of the term 'cake' shows in a subtly Freudian way that people are thinking about presidential jobs as favours, huge favours – some sort of blessing from above – instead of functions or assignments. What we need to focus on is the work to be done, not the employment offered to the appointee. This alone will bring in some sanity to this whole thing and perhaps provide a first step to building teams that will actually come close to attempting the task of finding solutions for our nation.

The question one should at this stage ponder is, where did this thing come from? How did we start thinking of a job as something you have instead of something you do? I think it started when the economy of Zambia hit rock bottom, i.e. after Kaunda's disastrous Stalinist experiments and Chiluba's dismal failure to reverse their effects. Poverty became quite pervasive in our once promising African state and suddenly new paradigms and memes crept in that have helped to compound the problem even further. With unemployment levels at Guinness book world record highs, everyone started looking at a job handed to you by the president as the ultimate favour.

A presidential appointment was a promotion from the true realities of the state of the nation to a sudden utopia that comes with the perks of the job. A presidential appointee would instantly begin to live a life that was not reflective of the poor nation at all, a life that seemed to emanate from another world – a better world. Whether in Kaunda or in Chiluba, and now even in Mwanawasa, the quickest way to be promoted to heaven from hell is simply to be given an appointment of some kind in any position, whether in the Foreign Service, in cabinet or even in the lower but still pleasurable District Administrator position. Both Chiluba and Kaunda realised that this was indeed the best way of creating friends out of enemies in our poor nation as one led the depressed people of Zambia; it is the most effective way of transforming impatient revolutionaries among them into obsequious followers.

This is why it has been easy for the members of the opposition in recent months to easily cross over whenever the president has offered them a job in his cabinet. Even the most vocal opponents of the president suddenly humble themselves and thankfully accept his offer when he presents it to them. It's the easiest way of taming the one who is your biggest critic.

I am not a perpetual opponent or critic of the president; I believe in balanced criticism of a leader – he needs to be patted on the back when he is doing something good (like his expressed political will to fight corruption), but he also needs to be told the honest and blunt truth when he is doing something wrong. A truly principled person cannot take a permanent or perpetual position in this regard, but rather a dynamic one that responds appropriately to different actions. I think that the president did not help the nation at all by continuing to think of jobs and appointments as something people have rather than something people do. But then again, I do not think I can censure him too harshly because his habit only represents what the general mindset of the nation is; he is just like the people who put him there, that is, us.

We must change, just as he must. It is difficult to change while the situation of poverty still persists in the nation. It is still much easier to think of jobs as favours. But we must try to change in our minds and begin to see reality once again from an undistorted view, unaffected by the clouds of poverty that stand between us and those enviable presidential appointments.

One way that this can change is for the president to make some of these jobs to be a little more reflective of current reality. There is no reason at all why a cabinet minister should drive four very expensive cars, for example, in a nation where the average person can not afford even a very cheap second-hand one. Those extra cars should have been sold and the money given to the Zambian central hospital (UTH) to create more bed space for the patients (there are many patients who share bed space at that hospital, believe it or not – how pathetic can this get?); or it can be used to get some drugs for them (many times they do not even have aspirin for the patients who develop headaches, believe it or not – a very sick patient dying in a hospital bed is simply told by the doctor to buy the aspirin from the shops when he has the time!).

Not only must the President reduce the number of cars for these jobs, he must also ban their trips completely. The Ministers, permanent secretaries, Ministry Directors, MPs, and so on, travel around the world all the time, sometimes on first-class tickets, and they are hosted in five star hotels with gold-plated bathroom taps, besides getting an allowance per day that is higher than the monthly salary of educated "middle-class" professionals. And to get them this sort of money, the poor man dying in the hospital pays a very high tax to the government on almost everything he buys, including the simple bus fare to get him to the hospital. This is just plain stupid. And yet our educated experts say our problems are caused by the 'Western neo-colonialist imperialists' … sheesh!

The other day the vice President came on TV and said the president will begin taking some very austere measures this year in order to control the budget after last year's financial crisis and the expected one this year. From what we have heard from the Finance Minister, these measures mostly have to do with punishing the taxpayer a little harder. Why our leaders can not see that the most effective measures are those that punish the few people living luxurious lives for doing nothing at the top is something that beats common sense. They should start thinking of making the lifestyles of those that are appointed by the president to be a little more reflective of reality and of the problems that the nation is going through. Instead what we had last year was an increase in not only the salaries of our MPs and other political leaders, but even an increase in the free loans that they receive for their vehicles (45 - 65 000 US dollars each, believe it or not).

In other words, the lifestyle of the people who have the jobs is always improving while the lifestyles of those who DO the jobs continue to go down to hell as the latter suffer with greater tax burdens so that they can sustain the lifestyles of the former. The most intelligent thing at this stage for anyone who has the right talents and abilities to do is not to stay in the country and watch while this circus gets worse, but to leave the country to find a better living for oneself in nations that recognise that jobs are primarily what you do, not what you have – countries that exalt intelligence and skill above friendship. I disagree with the president that Zambian professionals abroad should come back to rebuild the nation; only an insane person will heed that sort of appeal especially at this stage. Once you are out of this hell, don't come back until someone makes some changes in their approach to management of some very simple issues. You can only contribute with your great skills when the leaders have already done the basic things that do not require your higher knowledge. Do you need a Zambian Economics professor in New York specialised in 'Probabilistic Analysis of Augmented Phillips Curves' to come to tell you that you should cut down on cars for every Minister? Hmm.

I used to think that Zambia was perhaps economically irredeemable. Now I know that the only thing missing is just a little extra IQ in our leaders. If by some miracle of sorts we found ourselves having people in influential positions who have an IQ that is even slightly above 120, we could easily transform this nation into a very wealthy one – just as others have done to their once poor nations. Oxford trained Lee Kuan Yew managed to transform Singapore into one of the most promising nations from one that was once poorer than Zambia. It is not necessarily an Oxford education that demonstrates a high level of IQ – it is simply how one approaches common sense issues such as the ones we have right now of perks, trips and allowances for Presidential appointees and political office holders. That's IQ.

When you look at one simple issue where a high IQ could have solved the problem, you might not see it as a very significant contribution to saving money in the general economy. But when all the little things and decisions that could have been made better with application of a higher IQ are compounded together, you would immediately see a very, very high impact of intelligence on the economy. High IQ is required not just in the highest office, but also in the appointments that this office makes, including those at the lowest levels. When you appoint people with a low IQ to high, challenging positions, they will be busy spending time reading articles by Roy Clarke to see how they can deport him instead of thinking about practical solutions to the problems Clarke is highlighting in his revolutionary satirical way; the bottom line is that they can't think of the solutions, because they can't think, period. Instead of providing the answers, they get rid of the one asking the questions! It's all about IQ.

In fact, high IQ would recognise that we do not even need most of these useless appointments and positions at all – just as we do not need most of the government ministries, ambassadorial offices, Presidential trips, and so on – all of which consume much more than they produce. Good management is nothing but just sufficiently high IQ. A good manager with a high IQ can always see how he can devise ways of working with fewer people and less costs to produce greater results and higher returns – it's called making a higher profit in business, and it's called making a higher surplus in economic management; it's all the same. IQ is everything.

I know my article has slightly diverted from its starting premise, but it just feels so good to let a few things off my chest for now! Whew!

THE END.