By OWEN SICHONE –

In his speech to Parliament on Friday, on September 18, 2015, President Edgar Lungu said inter alia;“Government is, therefore, committed to having a productive workforce as a precondition for sustainable development and improved well-being of the people. Government has established the Kaizen Institute and is also considering establishing a national productivity centre which will promote continuous improvement throughout the economy.
“To make use of the Kaizen Institute, I have directed the Secretary to the Cabinet to ensure that continuous improvement is institutionalised in the Public Service.”
The concept of continuous improvement or Kaizen is impossible to implement in a non-literate culture.
In Japanese, Kaizen just means continuous improvement but the devil is in the detail.
When applied to competitive manufacturing industries it may mean improvement in quality which everybody supports or it could mean raising productivity which, as Koichi Shimizu noted in his article “Transforming Kaizen at Toyota”, makes workers anxious and stressed by the threat of not meeting targets and losing their jobs.
[But] even if we assume that higher quality means higher productivity it will not be easy for Zambia to implement Kaizen across all industries in a stress free manner unless there is a cultural revolution.
President Lungu said that  the theme for my address is “embracing a transformational culture for a smart Zambia now”.
To attain this transformation, we need to change the way we think, behave and do things.
My suggestion is that in addition to the changes in the work place, we must switch from oral traditions to a literate and numerate culture.
All the great civilisations kept records: how regularly  the Nile flooded, how much wheat was harvested, how much tax the emperor’s agents collected and how many children were born and baptised and on and so forth.
In his book “The Logic of Writing and the Organisation of Society” the late Cambridge anthropologist Jack Goody points out that, when ancient civilisations invented literacy and numeracy for record keeping, the lists the scholars produced were quite alien to the syntax of speech but had a feedback effect on other uses of language and possibly on language itself’.
The question is really whether Zambian society has adopted the ways of literate societies and if not how can we implement continuous improvement across all branches of industry?
It is only by keeping records that society can be sure that harvests are improving because of the new seed rather than the extension of areas under cultivation or use of manure but that is not enough.
Ancient empires appointed scholarly classes of people to management positions but the majority of the population were illiterate. Kaizen, however, needs a literate population.
If Toyota workers in Japanese plants or factories transplanted to America, Europe or South Africa are to contribute to continuous improvement of the Corolla, they too must be educated, and committed to the enterprise: willing and able.
Most of the literature suggests that European and American managers accepted that the Japanese way, Kaizen, was better than the methods Henry Ford used to mass produce the Model T so even overseas Toyota plants practise Kaizen.
Due to the diploma disease epidemic many Zambians have accumulated thick piles of certificates and now see themselves as intellectuals even though they only read textbooks, cannot spell or do arithmetic.
In his 1976 book “The Diploma Disease” Ronald Dore suggested that bureaucratization of economic life made the selection of staff by educational qualifications more universal.
This resulted in greater competition as well as qualification inflation whereby jobs previously done by diploma holders end up being done b PhD holders.
If employers want someone to make tea surely they should test them on their tea making skills and not list their school certificates, but we tend to prefer grade twelve over grade sevens for most jobs. This is contrary to the spirit of Kaizen.
Let us use the history of road construction in Zambia as an example.
The old roads hand made by J.E. “Chirupula” Stephenson and Sir Stewart Gore-Browne and their labourers were replaced in the post war period with mechanized road making.
The road foreman drove up and down his section of the road with his grader, caravan and bowser keeping the gravel roads passable as he moved from one campsite to the next.
After Independence Stirling Astaldi, ZECCO or Cogefar and other engineering firms built most of the tarred roads but maintenance was neglected.
Today China Jiangxi digs up the old roads and lays down a completely new surface rather than maintaining the old one. This too is not Kaizen and actually does damage to our history.
There is no cumulative Kaizen when the new road surface soon develops corrugated Henan bumps and jagged Jiangxi blisters.
Will we dig up the surface again in a few years if, inshallah, we are able to raise the funding? Will the engineers be Vietnamese or Nigerian?
As long as Zambian engineers cannot do continuous highway maintenance, we shall always rely on foreign experts to repeat the cycle of replacing pot-holed roads with expensive new projects every twenty years or so.
Oral traditions are the opposite of Kaizen. They do not follow linear time but repeat cycles: annual, monthly, weekly and daily.
Oral traditions do not value exact measurements, 08:00 hours and 08:10 are virtually the same.
This art of inexactitude is not limited to time keeping, our crooked carpentry and uneven bricklaying and sloping floors all suggest that we have no concept of the exact measurement; we always add mbasela or take away a few millimetres.
A change in thinking is not a tea party, it is a cultural revolution and we can have university degrees and still not understand modernity.
Each time I go for a haircut I am reminded of what my agricultural science teacher Mr Tanner (used to say to the boys in his Agricultural Science class at Kabulonga Boys School in 1970s as they manhandled the walking tractor: “Let the machine do the work!”
It is not the barber who is supposed to cut my hair by scraping my skull as if with a hoe, it is the electric clippers.
Let the machines do the work; you focus on making better machines that is the crucial part of Kaizen that we lack.
The author is a political anthropologist and Director of the Dag Hammarskjöld Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies at Copperbelt University; sichone@zambian.com.