Involvement of traditional leaders in community development

I have observed with keen interest that the distribution of national resources has been from top to bottom in African countries leaving traditional leaders hand-caped with little or no participation to provide an upper hand in developmental activities forgeting that they are the people leading the majority citizens in the country. About 60 percent of people in Africa particularly Zambia leave in rural areas.

The consequences of such approach is that development does not reach the needy, (rural people) because resources finish before they reach the bottom level especially that decisions are made by the central government about how national resources should be allocated.

Up to this time, the majority of rural areas in Africa(Zambia) do not have access to mobile phone, radio reception, TV reception and access to good roads. Because of these challenges people in rural communities have difficulties to develop their own areas. The question is who is responsible to develop rural areas? I guess it is the responsibility of the government to create an enabling environment which will attract investors to invest in rural areas, such investment will create employment to the local people.

However, I still believe that traditional should play an important role in governance because they are always with the people and their term of office is permanent as compared to elected government officials whose term expires after the period of 5 years in most democratic countries.

I also suggest that chiefs should have a big stake in decision making at national level. This will help  accelerate from bottom level to top level.


The government should learn from the emerging models in rural areas which involve the local people by: first visiting a chiefs, organizing stakeholders of that particular community, select a local talent from the same community and have him/her trained, after trainings the local talent is sent back to his/her community to be in charge of his/her own development.


I'm pretty sure that this is the kind of development everyone would like to see.