By Antonio Mwanza
GONZALES HAS UNDRESSED THE ZAMBIAN GOVERNMENT
Government must respond to these very serious revelations and allegations, they can’t sweep the dirt under the carpet…
1. When we paused funding to review our assistance programs last year, so much of Zambia’s health system began to crumble almost overnight…that crumbling system revealed that while we thought we were building capacity, successive Zambian governments had not built systems.
2. Last year I shed tears before the world when I announced a $50 million cut in US health assistance. After years of pleading, I could no longer standby while the Zambian government refused to stop or take action to hold people accountable for the systematic and nationwide theft of U.S. provided medicines while the Zambian citizens for whom those were intended went without.
3. One year later, not a single notable person has been arrested since last February. Not a single notable prosecution has even begun.
4. We continue to pay the salaries for over 23,000 healthcare workers, as we have for decades. Such is the legacy of America’s support to the Zambian people.
5. In reality, since October, my government has offered over $2 billion in additional health and economic assistance to Zambia. But we can no longer accept empty promises. The future must look different. The Zambian government must also increase Zambian funding, staffing, and genuine ownership of its systems.
6. Since January, however, like with so many of our other overtures to the Zambian government, we have had effectively zero substantive engagement from Zambian officials to move these efforts forward. Our calls go ignored, questions unanswered, meetings cancelled, leaving us without even opportunities to speak, much less engage in substantive deliberations. Instead of continuing to languish without engagement, the actual funding under our Health MOU should have started this month. Instead, we have reached April 30 still cobbling together funds for mismatched projects without an implementation plan to guide us forward under Zambian leadership, much less a finalized MOU that guides our strategic approach.
7. We know that the Zambian budget cannot even afford to pay for public services today…
8. At the same time, the Zambian government’s own reports reveal that every year Zambia loses over $4 billion in dirty money flows to East Asia. That is Zambian money that does not benefit the Zambian people or contribute to the budget. If taxed, that would bring an additional $1 billion for the government to fund healthcare, education, social services, and development.
9. Every year, hundreds of millions of dollars of government funds are lost to the Zambian people through corruption.
10. Officials draft policies they have no intention of implementing, invoking them in only speeches to sound like they are taking action. MOUs decay on the shelf among the others before the signing ceremony even ends, never to be implemented because the ministry won’t even meet to discuss implementation. Why? Because generations of Zambian officials and leaders gain from the dysfunction.
11. … appointing a Director General of the Anti-Corruption Commission who was actively under investigation by the ACC, and her admonishment to her intentionally under-resourced agency not to investigate senior government officials, only cripple hopes that clean business can be done.
12. Last May, multiple senior government officials shared with me and have confirmed that the government has a 500-page expert report detailing the irreversible harm and risk of generations of birth defects, cancers, heart and liver disease caused by carcinogenic heavy metals unleashed into the Kafue River ecosystem by last year’s Sino Metals’ tailings dam disaster. But, my heart broke when on July 29th last year, one of the country’s seniormost leaders vehemently denied that the government even had the report, much less would act on it until the polluter themselves provided it.
13. Zambia does not need money. It needs leaders who govern for the people with integrity. It needs the political will to put Zambia first.
But, of course, you don’t need me to say this. Dambisa Moyo, herself a daughter of the soil, made these same arguments 17 years ago.