Paruware Trust

This is the first in a series of blogs tocome on an issue that a small group of us have been talking about for a longtime- a disease that Zimbabwe is suffering from. Madofo is a shona word thatrefers to someone who is dull or maybe foolish. Usually you would find that inschools if you take the last place in class or anywhere near that, many otherchildren and even teachers would label you, dofo, denoting that you are dull ornot smart enough like the other children. However this is not the definition, Iwant to use for madofo. Those children who took last place where not dull atall, but I will not get into that discussion for now.

 Manytimes we sat and complained about different people in different places where weworked. Managers who seemed impossible and asked for one to do things you wouldconsider ridiculous but they thought it made sense and fretted over nothing,racist directors who relied on you to get the work done but never seemed toappreciate your role, managers who complained about a worker getting a fridgein their office when it had been literally taken from the dust bin and cleanedand they had thought it useless until then, managers who never wanted to hearcell phones ring at work, managers who thought putting internet at work wouldsuddenly make everyone lazy and should only be something that fellow managersuse because they were more responsible, supervisors who want to see officeworkers sit at their desks all day even if they are no results to show for allthat sitting. And they are all those sprouting business people who care onlyabout the profit margin they make today even though the quality of the productleaves a lot to be desired and do not bother themselves about such terms ascustomer satisfaction, customer loyalty and more often than not theirenterprises do not see the next generation, if they survive the founder. Allthese different people, so different yet so similar and then it suddenly struckus that they had some things in common short term thinking, closed in, slow tochange, inflexible, lacked exposure and thought they knew it all. As wecontinued to discuss this for days we suddenly came up with a name for them,madofo!!!

The real madofos, I want to talk about areadults in different places, schools, governments, NGOs, private sector and Godforbid, even churches. These people are usually in management positions andthey are there for reasons best known to themselves and most often than not arenot qualified for what they are doing. And I am not just talking of academicqualifications because as the series continues I will show you many madofoswith graduate degrees. In Steven Covey’s book on the 7 habits of highlysuccessful people, he mentions some critical points that leaders and everyother smart person should have such as being proactive, having an abundancementality, visionaries with the end, the bigger picture in mind, knowing how toprioritise important versus urgent things, thinking win/win, seeking tounderstand and then be understood, creative co-operation and sharpening the sawor continuing to develop and maintain yourself. Suffice to say many of thepeople I refer to as madofo, lack many of these attributes. And these are notthings you learn in school or a good university, unless you go to one of therare places, but these are things either you accidentally learn through some oflife’s tricks or you deliberately decide you want to develop these habits.

And why do I think this discussion ofmadofo is important- because these people are costing us. Costing us in termsof time spent doing unnecessary things, unimportant things, redundant things,ineffective things, expensive things and I hesitate to say this, but evenfoolish things. We have too many madofos in positions in Zimbabwe, we have putthem there and let them stay there, some because they were the only oneswilling to brave it out at their workplaces during the decade long crisis andthe smart ones left and when the time came to fill out the vacant managementpositions, they had enough years of experience under their belt to ‘qualify’them for the role and nobody questioned whether they had the acumen to not onlydo the job and maintain systems, but to have a vision to carry us forward intothe next century. I am sure Japan would not be where it is now in terms oftechnological innovation if they had had madofos managing their enterprises andI stand to be corrected. 

I hope you are beginning to get what I amtalking about. If you suddenly realise you have a dofo managing you, orwherever else, we would like to hear your story and keep the discussion goingand I will be back with more posts on this.