Denja, Left winger et al launched into a passionate radio discussion of the Flames’ game against Senegal the other day. Among the many observations and suggestions that they made, one caught my attention. This was that even if the Flames’ head coach was Pep Gardiola, Mikel Arteta or Arne Slot, the team would still perform miserably if the same players were maintained. They posited that the capabilities and commitment of the players were crucial in the performance of the team. They actually wondered why it was not possible to include Temwa and Tabitha Chawinga in the Flames.
The coaching panel is the leadership and the players the followership. I have stated more than one time before that the success of an organization or a nation depends on both the leadership and the followership. It is, of course, established that an organization or a nation falls or rises on leadership, meaning that the leader determines the direction of the people he or she leads. While this is indisputable, it should be appreciated that followers’ actions matter a lot. One of the management theories of the father of Scientific Management, Frederick Taylor, is that work ought to be divided between management and workers. The two must work hand in hand for efficiency to thrive. Likewise, followers must work had in hand with their leaders for them achieve success.
The beauty of democracy is that citizens have the opportunity to change leaders periodically. If those in leadership are not delivering, they can be voted out and new ones be ushered in. However, no opportunity whatsoever exists to change the followership. This, to me, is where democracy fails to deliver. Somehow, everybody believes that private citizens have no role to play in the economy of a country and that they should simply and wait for those in authority to hand to them what they need.
Apple is an American company, one that was founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976. One of their flagship products today is the iPhone. Although iPhones are designed in America, they get assembled away from America, typically in China. The older versions were assembled in Vietnam and India. This is so because the labour in these countries is way cheaper than that in America. To keep production costs low, Apple takes advantage of what economists call location economies in the Asian countries.
Labour is cheap in Malawi too, but none of the Silicon Valley companies contemplates setting up an assembly plant here. Reason? The labour may be cheap but it is not skilled. True, there are a few highly skilled individuals scattered across the landscape but generally speaking, our labour is not skilled. Whereas in India, Vietnam, Malaysia, South Korea, China and other Asian counties, the average person would invest time in reading relevant manuals in order to follow the appropriate instructions on how a gadget should be operated or repaired, the average Malawian would find that too taxing and would, instead, find ways of improvising.
With few exceptions, Malawians generally do not pay attention to minute details, considering that too laborious for comfort. During the Mothers’ Day Holiday last week, a reporter went around asking people to state the significance of the day. The responses he got were shocking, to say the least. “It is a day to remember the death of John Chilembwe”; “It is a day to remember the birth of the President” were some of the responses. This may sound like harmless ignorance on things that do not matter, but what is worrying is that the casual manner in which such issues are approached would easily permeates the approach to more serious issues. It would be absurd to expect the respondents to the reporter’s question to assemble iPhones. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) will keep eluding us not only because of the failure of leaders to instill a conducive economic climate but also, perhaps even more so, because we, the followers, are not there yet and appear to be eons away.
Just like changing the Flames’ coaches would not change the fortunes of the team, so too changing national leaders alone will have little impact on the country’s situation. I have posited before that if, on one hand, the world’s best leader, whoever that is, came to Malawi to lead the current followers, he or she would have a bumpy ride and would not achieve much. If, on the other hand, the people of Taiwan came to live in Malawi and we maintained the country’s leaders, there would be transformational development in the country in not time. This goes to show the importance of followership.