Technology and Governance

Disclaimer: The following is based on online research and may not be a complete account of the technology situation in government.

With that said, shall we begin.

There was a time when computers were rare in government, only available to a select few. Those days are long gone and we should be happy with that but we question to what degree this technology is helping our leaders govern our country. I ask the question, "is having computers in a ministry enough?" The answer is most certainly not.

For ministries like Finance, Commerce and any of the rest that do number crunching, the use of technology is more evident. They churn out expenditure reports, budgets etc. For others like Foreign Affairs, Works and Supply, they obvious do have reports being created what remains to be seen is the extent to which processes and decisions are built on the backbone of ICT. If a spot request was made for the number of vehicles on the government books, which are runners and the like, how long would it take to get a response? Do ministers rely on computer based Management Information for decision making? Government would gladly sign off expenditure on a management information system to be set up as an information repository and/or report generator. What needs to be seen is the will to make full use of such a system.

What do we need to do to improve governance?

A lot. To start with, mindset or cultural change. I remember a photo of the late Michael Chilufya Sata, may his soul rest in peace, hard at  work at his desk with mountains of paper work and no computer in sight. If I could ask him, he'd say computers are before his time and a needless bother. As the generation of leaders gets younger, we need more emphasis from them on rooting how the country is managed. It should not be seen as "by the way" thing.

Record keeping should be computerised. A paperless government may be pushing it but if 40% of the paper stored in archives can be cut out, imagine the space freed up and the cost of that paper channelled to other things or banked as savings.

Our registration systems need to be linked or made into one. When you get a National Registration Card (NRC), getting a passport should be seamless as the passport office can make an easy query for the rest of the information required. Extend it to birth and death certificates, as well as voters registration. Plus road licencing.

As part of the freedom to information bill,every government wing must make available key operating data and information for the public to use in their research or to know what that said wing is doing. Of course, this does not mean giving us classified information but a good amount of it on websites. Having a website as a ministry should be the norm not the exception. As a side note, I was very disappointed by the Bank of Zambia website when I was looking for old quarterly statements for financial institutions. I found nothing. Maybe I was looking in the wrong place. Information is key in decision making, our leaders need to put the processing of such information as a priority. ICT gives them this capability.

All parts of government should have computer systems to take away this manual paper-filled routine we have grown to accept. The Ministry of Lands has a computerised database of deeds, why shouldn't the home affairs one have a database of fingerprints, criminal records, etc?

Works and Supply could employ a fleet management system to track the massive number of vehicles government owns. I believe a lot of money is wasted on vehicles.

These are some of things I could think of and I'm sure someone reading this has thought of their own was we can really move with the times as a nation.....