Why Walking Away Can Be The Boldest Career Move

Jeannette Ilunga, Southern Sun Ridgeway Hotel, LUSAKA | 1 October, 2025 — Fifteen students earned distinctions in her literature class—proof that she was an exceptional teacher. Yet when success finally found her, Mrs. Noriana Mseteka Muneku walked away. Years later, she would leave banking too, even after mastering that world. Each time she seemed to arrive, she chose to depart, an unconventional pattern that would one day define her leadership.

Now serving as Permanent Secretary in Zambia’s Ministry of Education, Mrs. Noriana Muneku stood before girls from ten Lusaka secondary schools at the Girls Lead Camp held at Southern Sun Ridgeway Hotel on 1 October 2025, explaining why being "mediocre" mattered more than anyone ever told her it would.

The Unexpected Path to Leadership

Mrs. Muneku’s story began with a mismatch. She excelled in home economics and imagined herself teaching it, but the University of Zambia had other plans: she would train to teach literature instead. Her pivot worked. The first class she taught produced fifteen distinctions. Success came swiftly, but satisfaction did not. What followed surprised those who knew her: she left education for banking, entering a world far removed from classrooms and chalkboards.

For eight years she managed accounts and processed transactions, building what looked like stability. Yet that familiar restlessness returned—the quiet conviction that she was meant for something different.

“I was so monotonous,” she recalled of those banking years.

To Mrs. Muneku, the security others longed for felt like slow suffocation t her. So, while raising three children and managing a household, she made another radical choice: returning to university to study law.

Her appetite for learning did not stop there, it was followed by postgraduate studies in women’s law and human rights pursued abroad while balancing family life. Each step seemed to pull her further from a defined career path, but in hindsight, every detour prepared her for something larger. From legal counsel to CEO of the Zambia National Business Society (ZNBS), and now Permanent Secretary, her path was never straight. Looking back, it all connects—the decisions to leave were the very decisions that led her where she is now.

Education Without End Points

While addressing the young girls at the Girls Lead Camp, Mrs. Muneku challenged the familiar notion that education has a finish line. “I want to preach to you, young ones, that there is no end to education,” she said. “It depends on what you want, how hungry you are for it, how badly you need it.”

She spoke this as a bureaucrat and someone who had lived that truth—the mother returning to lecture halls, the banker becoming a lawyer, the leader who kept choosing growth over comfort.

The Girls Lead Camp, a collaboration between Zambia’s New Dawn Government and Stanbic Bank, aims to promote career pathways for girls, foster peer mentorship, and link students directly with women in leadership. It is an initiative that mirrors the Ministry of Education’s broader mission: guiding girls toward choices that fit their ambitions and see past their circumstances. Her message aligned perfectly with that vision—education as a lifelong journey, not a checklist to complete.

Taking Ownership

Mrs. Muneku’s message was simple but firm: mentors can open doors, but only you can walk through them. “To really tell you what you are going to be,” she said “it is up to yourself because it is you who is going to choose the path that you want to be on what we are giving you here are just guides.”

She also spoke candidly about Zambia’s economic reality, she stated that white-collar jobs are limited, and degrees no longer guarantee employment. Entrepreneurship, she argued, must be part of the conversation.

For girls from vulnerable backgrounds, her message cut even deeper. “You can look like you are vulnerable. You can look like you do not have, but it is not the end of you,” she urged. “You can get what you want.” Her words neither romanticised poverty nor indulged pity. Instead, she insisted that resilience and choice could rewrite destiny. It was a grounded kind of hope and belief that opportunity may not be given, but it can be built.

Character Over Credentials

Reflecting on her own rise to Permanent Secretary, Mrs. Muneku dismissed the notion that connections or luck were responsible. “Your integrity is extremely important,” she emphasised. Her point on integrity over advantage stood out in a world often cynical about merit. For her, leadership was the natural outcome of consistent values, not clever positioning.

She also reminded the students that true growth is not solitary and that knowledge hoarded serves no one but knowledge shared creates waves. For the young girls in that room, those words carried particular power because each success story could light the path for others. Mrs. Muneku’s insistence on mentorship as a two-way process turned the idea of leadership into something communal and multiplying.

Shaping the Nation

At the end of her address, Mrs. Muneku turned her attention from personal success to national purpose. “It is a woman that shapes families,” she firmly stated, “It is a woman that shapes the world, and you are the women who will shape our country,” she declared. “You have the power to lead because you have been empowered.” Her call was about inspiration, accountability and the responsibility that comes with opportunity. Each girl in that room represented a fragment of Zambia’s future, and Mrs. Muneku wanted them to see that leadership starts long before the title arrives.

Girls Lead Camp continues its work across Zambia’s secondary schools, reaching young girls who are ready to imagine more for themselves. Through stories like Mrs. Muneku’s, they are reminded that leadership is not born of privilege but of persistence and that every small act of courage and every return to the classroom, adds to a national story still being written.

Mrs. Noriana Muneku’s life challenges the idea that quitting equals failure. Each time she walked away from teaching, from banking, from comfort—she was, in truth, walking toward something greater. Her story proves that growth often demands leaving behind what once defined you, and that the courage to walk away can be the very thing that carries you forward.

Like Steve Jobs once said: “You cannot connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So, you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

Mrs. Muneku’s journey mirrors that truth and looking back, every shift built upon the last, preparing her for the role she holds today. What once looked like uncertainty now reads as design, proof that purpose often reveals itself only after the courage to act.