ARE POWER EXPORTS PART OF THE IMF CONDITIONS?
By Sean Tembo – PeP President
1. This loadsheding does not make sense for several reasons. Firstly, Kariba dam only accounts for less than 30% of the total electricity supply in Zambia, meaning that even if production was reduced by half, the overall impact on national electricity supply would be less than 15%. It also follows that a 15% deficit in national supply of electricity would amount to (15% x 24hrs) 3.6 hrs of loadsheding per day, and not the current 12 hours that we are seeing. Unless of course the major cause of loadsheding is not the lower levels of water in Kariba dam, but the export of power to neighboring countries.
2. Additionally, this loadsheding has caused a huge uproar across the political divide. People are upset, regardless of whether one is a UPND, PF or PeP supporter, they are all upset. So for political expediency, President Hakainde Hichilema would have resolved this loadsheding by either ending it completely or at least reducing it. But he is firm in continuing the loadsheding despite the continued public uproar and possibly his dwindling political fortunes.
3. Luckily, this is not the first time that we are seeing President Hakainde Hichilema being headstrong about an issue that causes huge public discontent. When people started complaining about lack of medicines in health facilities, the President was non-committal about when drug shortages would end, except to emphasize that the previous drug suppliers were corrupt and his Government was cleaning the system by auditing it, hence the drug shortages. Suffice to mention that up to now, more than a year after people first started complaining about drug shortages, there are no drugs in health facilities.
4. Again, soon after the lack of drugs issue began, we saw President Hakainde Hichilema’s government distributing as little as 4 bags of fertilizer to cooperatives made up of 20 people, where the farmers had to share one bag of fertilizer among the five of them, using medas to do the sharing. Despite the huge public uproar, President Hakainde Hichilema was firm in justifying the reduced fertilizer allocation by saying the previous suppliers of fertilizer were corrupt and they had to audit the system.
5. Sometime along the way, President Hakainde Hichilema embarked on a policy to revise fuel prices on a monthly basis, on the last day of each month. Again, there was a huge uproar among the people regarding this policy, as it introduced great uncertainty in the pricing of a key production input, but the President was adamant and has since continued with this retrogressive policy up to this day.
6. For some of us, we used to strongly suspect that there was a strong hidden hand behind the President’s retrogressive decisions because l couldn’t imagine the President making such bad decisions on his own Accord. However, our speculation was brought to an end when the UPND Party Spokesperson Honorable Cornelius Mweetwa featured on a Diamond TV evening program and admitted that the policy to review fuel prices on a monthly basis was not an initiative of the President but was imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as one of the conditions for the $1.4 billion bailout loan that they gave us.
7. Our worry has been that when you look at the IMF conditions which are available on the Ministry of Finance website, you will not find this condition on monthly reviews of fuel prices. This means the IMF gave this country two sets of conditions; one set which is public and available on the MoF website, and another set which is secret and only known by the President and his senior officials. This should make every well-meaning Zambian concerned. Why did Government decide to keep some IMF conditions secret? What are they hiding? What happened to transparency which President Hakainde Hichilema often spoke about?
8. Our considered view is that, since the IMF imposed on Government to reduce the allocation of fertilizer under FISP, and also imposed on Government to review fuel prices on a monthly basis, and also imposed on Government to reduce the budget for free medicines in hospitals, it is very likely that the reason President Hakainde Hichilema has continued to export electricity despite the huge public uproar towards loadsheding, is because it is an IMF that the country must export electricity, whether it brings about loadsheding locally or not. For some of us who were against borrowing from the IMF because of their retrogressive conditions, we have now been vindicated. Only God knows how many other retrogressive IMF conditions are in the secret list which Government is keeping away from the Zambian people.
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SET 10.01.2023