By Wesley Macheso
There is a difference between ‘working’ and ‘being seen to be working’. If you have ever worked with Malawians at any level, you would appreciate this discrepancy.
For example, if you have people working in your maize field, you can rest assured that most of them will be chatting and doing other things until they see you coming from a distance.
That is when they get down to work, so that the boss is satisfied with their pretentious performance.
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This has become our work ethic, even at the highest levels—very few people actually work, while most just pretend to be working for the sake of good optics.
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This attitude towards work is vividly perceived in our politicians. If you think about where we are coming from, after decades since independence, you will realise that not much has been done in this country.
We are at least two hundred years behind the developed world, as though we do not share the same air with those who have developed.
Even countries around us are miles ahead in development, while we are still stuck on basics like food, water and shelter.
One thing for sure is that somebody, somewhere is not working. Is not it ridiculous then that at every corner we are confronted with the smiling faces of our leaders on billboards, boasting of having developed the country?
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Another good example of people wanting to be seen to be working instead of doing the actual job can be drawn from what Cabinet ministers do when they are newly appointed to their positions.
They have what they call ‘familiarisation tours’, which simply means travelling aimlessly across the country in pretence of working.
They claim they want to appreciate what is happening on the ground so that they can take action. It is such tours that we have been witnessing recently, even with this government and it is becoming somewhat embarrassing.
You may recall that when he was elevated to the vice-presidency, Michael Usi stormed the Shire Valley, barging into people’s offices and asking why some officers were not at their desks.
This was done in the guise of bringing sanity to the public service. To the uninformed person on the streets, the vice president appeared to be working.
But to what extent were his actions ‘work’? If it was about bringing sanity to the public service, did the late Saulos Chilima and his team not produce a whole document on reforms in public service that the authorities are now sitting on? Why then do we love to be dramatic?
And last week, the newly appointed Minister of Labour, Vitumbiko Mumba, was also on the road, trying to shake sleeping dogs awake.
He made a surprise visit to a company that trades in poultry and closed it down for poor hygiene and deplorable working conditions.
The minister then stormed yet another company, where he was locked outside the gate and vicious dogs were unleashed on him.
This is where the storms brew. The Chinese owners of the company were charged with several misdemeanours and an altercation between the minister and a lady working for the company caused an uproar on socal media.
But that is meat for another day.
One wonders whether what the Minister was doing at these companies is truly ministerial at all. All institutions are structured in such a way that certain responsibilities are reserved for specific offices.
At the Ministry of Labour, there must surely be inspectors whose job it is to ensure that minimum standards are met by companies licensed to operate in this country.
It should not take the entire minister to inspect factories to see if minimum standards are met. The minister’s real work lies at the level of policy; that is where he should be focusing his efforts.
