If highly-educated people can’t be supervised, who should be?

My prayers are with the Office of the Prime Minister family on the loss of their Permanent Secretary Keith Muhakanizi. He sometimes made public service admirable, even for those outside of it. That generation of public servants, knowledgeable and firm, is getting rare.

Talking of public service, it is hard to know what is going on. [Prime Minister] Robinah Nabbanja has been widely quoted, wondering how she is expected to supervise a woman who is highly educated like Mary Goretti Kitutu [Karamoja Affairs minister] . She confesses to not knowing what Kitutu is ‘doctor of’ but that, she knows she is a doctor.

And who can blame her, in a world where too many people walk around claiming they are ‘doctors’ of this or that. It can be confusing. One day I left my work ID at one of the ministry gates. When I returned, the guard asked that she wanted to consult me on something. We stepped aside, then she said, ‘doctor, I have been having this recurrent pain in my…’ I felt bad, and gently told her I was a masquerading doctor. And gave her something small to see a real doctor.

When we were younger, we were told, ‘your work must speak for you’, and that you could not possibly walk around telling people how good you are, how much brilliance resides above your shoulders. I knew people, who looked dull and uninteresting, even uninspiring, until you saw what they were doing or heard of their accomplishments, then you would be in awe, giving real respect. 

Not even the real doctors, walked around saying, ‘I am doctor so and so’. The world has changed, a lot. The little girl you supervised yesterday may very easily become your boss tomorrow. 
In a training for leaders, I attended recently, the facilitator was unrelenting in her plea to supervisors, ‘do not confuse confidence for competence’. She kept repeating that the notion of a confident person as a competent one, can be problematic for those in leadership and in making hiring decisions.  Once hired, they are not what they seemed. It reminded me of the old saying, ‘do not judge a book by the cover’. 

Someone told me the other day, in response to my article last week about the framing of women leaders, that it is important to refrain from framing women as incorruptible or good leaders because of their nurture. What if we simply treated women as human beings? Or to treat it as Hillary Clinton put it, that women’s rights are just human rights in the end.

Never put people in the same box just because they share identity. Even women have varied interests, including those in the same political party. So naturally, women politicians, will have variety of interests. You can never bulk women, because they belong to the same political party, have attained a certain level of education or are rural, and assume that they are all the same.
The truth is, you cannot generalise human beings, based on some identity markers, which most times, are laden with value judgments. For instance, not all men beat women, not all men sexually harass women at work, not all husbands provide for women, not all working women do not support their husbands, and so on and so forth. The biggest problem, is to judge human beings on the basis of their achievements.

If education, or lack of it, was the true measure of man or of integrity, then all the people stealing from the government, the sick and their partners, would not be occupying so much of our discussion. Look at how much length the government has gone to, if the account of President Museveni is to go by, to just fight corruption, with little success. Then there are the land issues and well-dressed fraudsters working in great institutions of government and private sector.

Even with all the evidence that it is not uneducated people in offices involved in corruption, the good minister still imagines and assumes, that educational attainment implies no supervision.  It cannot apply even in relationships, that just because you have met a good-looking man or woman, who is a doctor of something, you assume they are a decent human being. You have to account for poor parenting or lack of it, environment, family background and general lack of common sense or good manners.

In the world of work, supervision is not necessarily because you do not trust people or they have less education, it is part of work culture and process. If part of your job description is to supervise and you cannot do so, you have failed everyone involved. These are challenging times for leaders, they have to rise to the occasion, all the time.

Ms Maractho (PhD) is the director of Africa Policy Centre and senior lecturer at Uganda Christian University.                       [email protected]