By Sean Tembo – PeP President
1. Some things we can argue about while other things are inarguable. It is inarguable that President Hakainde Hichilema has the most bloated civil service in the history of Zambia since independence. Despite creating several meaningless Permanent Secretary (PS) positions at Cabinet Office and appointing PSs in addition to Directors to head Departments at Ministries such as Home Affairs, Sports, Youth & Culture, having two economic advisors at State House etcetera, he has now proceeded to create an additional layer of bureaucracy at State House, called the Presidential Delivery Unit (PDU).
2. Evidently, the President is trying to compensate for his lack of management skills by having a bloated civil service. He believes, wrongly so of course, that the larger the civil service, the greater the chance that he will deliver on his basic mandate of uplifting the living standards of the Zambian people. But he is very wrong. The only way to compensate for the lack of management skills in a leader is for that leader to, first of all, appoint competent subordinates, and secondly allow those subordinates to operate autonomously, without interference from the incompetent leader.
3. But the case of President Hakainde Hichilema is one of double tragedy. In fact, it is one of the triple tragedies. I say so because firstly it is inarguable that the President himself is incompetent and lacks even the most basic of management skills. Secondly, the President has failed to appoint competent subordinates, but has instead appointed senior civil servants on the basis of patronage to his political party; the UPND, as well as on the basis of kinsmanship. Thirdly, President Hakainde Hichilema does not believe in the delegation. He believes in having his hands in every little activity that his Government is engaged in at any given time, despite his inherent incompetence.
4. This is the reason why the quality of decisions coming from Hakainde Hichilema’s Government are below par. You find a state institution such as NAPSA lending money to foreigners so that they can construct the Lusaka – Ndola road and collect toll fees for 25 years and calls it a PPP project!!! Instead of increasing the number of oil refineries so that eventually there can be one in every provincial center, he kills the only one that we have and converts it into a storage facility, thereby killing all industries that depended on heavy fuels and bitumen, such as Ndola Energy Company which was an independent power producer. Instead of reducing the price of key production inputs such as fuel and electricity, he increases them substantially and then wonders why the cost of living is ever going up!!!
5. Indeed, President Hakainde Hichilema has not made a single sensible, publicly known decision, ever since he ascended to the presidency. If l believed in witchcraft, l would have thought that he has been bewitched. That someone has cast a spell on him so that he should always make bad decisions for our country. But the problem is not about witchcraft, it is about his management style or lack thereof. The key issue is that despite being inherently incompetent, he holds a false belief that he is super competent. And since he believes that he is super-competent, he brushes off anyone around him who seeks to offer him advice. And when it becomes apparent that his decisions are not yielding fruits, he simply goes and employs more people and creates more departments such as this so-called Presidential Delivery Unit. May God have mercy on our nation.