What should we as Zambians demand from our civic leaders to ensure that they are accountable for the proper discharge of public funds?
For starters I think the Government should really invest in creating a transparent system. Transparency from pay, to budget, to resource allocation. If everything is in the open, it becomes a lot harder for misuse of funds and helps increase accountability.
Hi. If someone knows the formula for doing this (ensuring transparency & accountability) please do share... In principle we all couldn't agree more about putting all civic business out in open, but how does it actually begin to happen on the ground???
Traditionally, in much of Africa, our accountability lines ended with village headmen, Chiefs and Senior/Paramount Chiefs. These people were RARELY democratically elected individuals but that did not matter as much as the fact that they helped to sustain the lines of accountability down the generations. Now, we have imported leadership structures that are all but completely independent of traditional system, and we want to excel in accountability??? It is interesting to note that advanced democracies like Japan, western Europe, Australia, etc, still have their democratic leadership structures accountable to monarchs (whether or not those monarchs are just symbolic). Question is, did we shoot ourselves in the foot by throwing our traditional leadership structures out the window, thinking democracy and democracy alone was the cure-all we needed? True leaders will tell you that leadership is not all about listening to your followers, sometimes you really do have to lead, i.e., take people where they may not want to go but need to go, and that principle will never be found in the Democracy Bible.
Maybe for better accountability and transparency, we need to take a patient and very wise look at the civic leadership models we aspire to.
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