Human capital, a resource abused or ignored!

The greatest tool we have to effect meaningful and lasting change in our circumstance is our ability as higher order beings, to engage our faculties in creative and problem solving processes.  This ability allows us to appraise situations and deploy interventions in a manner that resolves challenges.

Pre-emptively and consistently engaging in processes that anticipates issues and proffer effective solutions is the bane of modern societies. This requires a deliberate effort in developing human capital as a resource base to engender transformation and productivity.

A nation fails when it undermines its human resource and continues to embark on escapades informed by inept and ghoulish imposters as leaders.   With little or no moral compass, their course is inevitably hellish with disastrous consequences.

Most parents become concerned when their ward fails to achieve expected milestones. They will quite early, seek specialist advice to address issues: be it failure to thrive or delayed motor or language skills or poor academic attainments. Typically most cultures would be concerned when their adolescent are unable to engage with statutory processes be it school, skills training or norms and values of the community.

Minding the business of state appears to operate on a different premise. Sadly the saying 'Everyone's business is no one's business' appears to hold true in a setting where the 'servants' remain bereft of altruistic motivations in dispensing their duties.

Appointments to state office is uninformed by value judgements about individuals character or positive experience of leadership but rather by subtexts of profligate and wanton depredation of public resources. There are accounts of communities preferring candidates with a willingness to compensate them for their votes when they get into office or local authorities only given contracts to bidders based on an "understanding".

So what is the basis of investment in human capital? And how do we transform a nation with unscrupulous leadership inclination to one committed to good governance? Is it the case that not one good soul exists to steer this ship out of troubled waters?  Are we all so corrupt that a little leaven has leavened the whole?

The current status of leadership does show that we still don't get it. The efforts of a scanty few is lost in the drain that the national assembly represents as it stands. There is little selflessness or true stewardship exemplified as has been demonstrated in the last two years of this dispensation - period. Not while they continue to receive the ridiculous stipends and salaries which they justify by virtue of elected office!  Not as if they earned it by dint of hard work such as following an examination or test. No they were voted into office to serve the people but what is apparent now is that they 'have the people - their sweat, their blood and their lives'.

Indeed true advocates of democracy would argue that what we have is "a government of the few, by the few and for the few ... well placed elites".  Little wonder the cry of the people falls on deaf ears - deadened by the lack there-of of human values of compassion, kindness and empathy. The story of the good Samaritan is apt. What is mine is yours! In contrast to the Levite(priests) what is mine is mine or worse still, the thief what is yours is mine! We see the latter across our national institutions and corridors of power.

What hope?

The gateway to developing true human capital requires a tripartite focus on people, principles and processes.

Across the age spectrum a deliberate effort to invest in the people to build the nation is in essence a pre-requisite for sanitizing our society.

Establishing principles that guide and bind us as a nation, that eschews vanity and embeds values of integrity, that rewards labour and encourages pursuit of knowledge, that is liberating rather than constraining, that is informing rather than deforming, that empowers and is not destructive, that is tangible rather than based on innuendoes and fantasies or indeed racial, religious or humanist bigotry. Principles that become the conscience of the people!

Developing processes as virtual template to translate visions into reality, to embed a culture of faith, hope and belief. Processes that act as the how-to-do and what-to-do!  Where no longer do some have an interpretation of the Will of people but all know what the will of the people represents. Processes that grant equal access to the nation's resources and shares these resources equitably to all based on their individual needs or disposition.

(to be continued.)