THE Zambia Development Agency (ZDA) has imparted business skills to about 1,500 Zambia Telecommunication Company (Zamtel) employees who will be separated from the company following the recent acquisition of 75 per cent shares by LAP Green Network of Libya.
The Zamtel employees were being counselled that they could start small businesses and grow them into large enterprises provided that they engaged financial discipline, hard work, systematic planning, perseverance, information seeking and other entrepreneurial characteristics that build successful entrepreneurs.
ZDA director of micro and small enterprise (MSE) division, Windu Matoka said the agency had to-date counselled about 1, 500 Zamtel employees out of the total workforce of around 2, 400.
Mr Matoka said the majority of the trained employees were from Copperbelt, where close to 800 workers were counselled, while the rest of the workers were from other provinces.
Speaking in an interview in Livingstone, Mr Matoka said seven provinces had been covered so far, adding that Western Province would be covered up to Friday this week while the last training session would be held in Lusaka Province next week.
“As ZDA, we are going round Zambia to conduct pre-separation counselling sessions for all Zamtel workers who are about to be separated from the company.
“The new majority shareholders of Zamtel may restructure the company and streamline the operations, hence some workers may be separated in the process,” he said.
The counselling programme is aimed at adequately preparing the employees on how best to invest their terminal benefits.
The guest speakers during the sessions were personnel from the office of the vice-president, especially the department of land resettlement, who are giving tips on various resettlement schemes.
Others helping to train the employees are commercial banks which include Cavmont, Zanaco, Intermarket Securities, Standard Chartered Bank, Barclays Bank Zambia and National Credit and Savings Bank.
Mr Matoka said the banks were training Zamtel employees on various financial products suitable for people who were about to be retrenched or retired.
He said the message to Zamtel workers was that they should accept change and understand that they could do more by embracing self employment away from the formal employment. Mr Matoka was happy that the response from Zamtel employees had been overwhelming since the counselling sessions started.
[Times of Zambia]