Last week I focused on attribute of followership, namely courage. This week we shall discuss one more important attribute, namely competency. As a country we are desperately wanting in this attribute.
There is no denying that we have a number of competent individuals in various fields, in Social and Natural Sciences, Engineering, Accountancy, Medicine and other disciplines. However, the vast majority of the population comprises people who are not skilled in any discipline. If we were skilled we would be the darling of foreign investors who would want to take advantage of the location economies resulting from our cheap labour. To speak bluntly, our salaries are among the lowest in the world. If anybody out there would want to tap into cheap labour, Malawi would be the place to go to. The only reason we do not see investors coming here despite our cheap labour is because the labour is, generally speaking, unskilled.
Many technology companies from the West set up assembly plants in places like South Korea, Malaysia, Thailand or India. The labour is both skilled and cheap in these countries. The famous iPhone, for example, is assembled in China, India and Vietnam despite being an American product. Apple located the iPhone assembly plants in those countries to take advantage of the cheap but skilled labour force there.
Such opportunities elude us because we lack skilled labour. I would hasten to add that we also lack honest labour. A white South African friend of mine set up a business in Blantyre, selling printing supplies. He rented a huge warehouse where he kept his merchandise. His Malawian workers, unfortunately, kept stealing from the warehouse over the years, eroding his profit margin so much that he eventually had to close the business.
Lack of skill and dishonesty are not attributes that would attract foreign investors to this, or to any, country. We lose out on foreign direct investment as a result. Our leaders may not be doing certain things right, which has been contributing to keeping foreign investors at bay. Many experts believe, for example, that if most of the controls over things like foreign exchange rates were loosed, investors would probably consider bringing their investment here. This columnist believes that if our cheap labour was skilled, that would be an additional incentive for investors to consider coming here. This is how important the followership attribute of competence is.
It is lamentable that we, the private citizens, are not doing enough to improve our levels of competence. On the contrary, we engage in acts that run counter to that objective. In the past week a video clip showing an adult giving kachasu (local spirit) to a minor went viral. That is precisely how not to uplift a society’s level of competence. In my estimation the minor was a boy aged between eight and eleven. Getting addicted to alcohol at any age is a cause for concern, but at that age, it is dreadful in the extreme. It will simply rob the innocent boy of his future. There is no way an alcoholic can concentrate on his/her studies, certainly not at that tender age. Any generation raised in that manner will be a lost generation. It will be foolhardy to expect world class competences that would attract foreign investors in such a generation. Giving alcohol to minors is a curse. I cannot imagine anything more diabolical!
Alcohol aside, we fail to raise our skill levels, generally speaking. I am talking about self-development not formal education. It is common knowledge that the majority of us loathe formal education. In my job as Lecturer, I have come across many young people who are attending tertiary education because their parents insist so; otherwise they themselves would rather be doing something else.
There is so much that we can do outside formal education, that we do not, to gain new skills. The world wide web (www) has made communication so easy (and cheap!) that it has been touted to have ushered in the new renaissance (rebirth of knowledge) after the first renaissance which resulted from the invention of printing in the 15th century. Individuals can learn so much on the Internet, with the availability of so many educational sites. Even seemingly simple sites like Tik Tok can be a great educational resource. The tragedy is that while Chinese and Japanese kids watch clips that explain technology on Tik Tok our kids here mostly watch silly jokes on the same platform. If we carefully select which sites to visit on www we can educate ourselves beyond what we could ever imagine.
There is a lot we can do to advance ourselves.