We note that whereas most of our colleagues from Francophone countries are able to speak English fluently, our employees cannot even exchange a simple greeting in French without the aid of an interpreter. As you are well aware, Your Excellency, Zambia has eight neighbouring countries amongst whom, at least, one is French speaking; two are Portuguese speaking and the rest are Anglophone. As neighbours and countries falling under the same sub-regional and regional groupings, we collaborate a lot amongst ourselves on a number of regional cooperation agreements where inability to speak, read or write French or Portuguese is sometimes a major communication barrier. For instance, in Africa Zambia belongs to three regional groupings, namely SADC, COMESA and the African Union (AU). All these groupings include Francophone member states, and, at times, our interests, as a nation, have not been well articulated to our Francophone counterparts in these regional groupings due, in part, to our inability to communicate effectively in French. Further, as I stated earlier, Zambia shares a border with one of the largest and populous country in Africa - the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) - where the official language is French. However, in spite of being neighbour to this huge market, Zambian enterprises have not captured the enormous business opportunities offered by the DRC, largely, on account of their inability to communicate effectively in French. The same also applies to Angola where there is a huge reconstruction programme going on, in which Zambian enterprises could participate.
Notwithstanding the above, the French lessons programme is a very challenging one to our staff in that students are not only required to attend, at least, 90 per cent of class work conducted twice a week for two hours, but are also required to take examinations every ten (10) weeks; implying that only those employees who succeed in the examinations are allowed to proceed to the next advanced level. Your Excellency Following the commencement of the French lessons, I am pleased to inform you that this programme has already started showing encouraging results, as evidenced by the fact that at the end of the first segment of the beginners’ course, all those who took the examinations passed and are progressing to the next stage. The results could have been even better had all the 78 enrolled students attended tuition and taken the examination as scheduled. Let me also clarify here that some employees missed the examinations due to the call of duty and not out of lack of commitment. In this regard, I wish to assure Your Excellency that as a sign of commitment on the part of individual employees and the bank, a crush programme has been put in place to enable those who missed the first examination to sit for it and catch up with the rest of the class by April this year.