CELEBRATING AN IMF LOAN SHOWS WHY ZAMBIA REALLY NEEDS FREE EDUCATION UP TO TERTIARY LEVEL
I sat in class for many years in a local and then international university. Not one day did any of them ever tell me that getting an IMF loan was good for any African country. All assignments I ever wrote spoke to my understanding of IMF and the World Bank loans being bad for Africa. Their conditionalitIies called ‘The Washington Consensus,’ prescribed things that injured the African economies. They said they gave the same prescriptions to all African countries despite specific problems for each country. It was said that sometimes as you signed the loan contracts and the Structural Adjustment Programmes, SAP, that came with them, you could find the name of another country there, because they just uplifted the contract from this country to another. This is tantamount to giving one type of medicine to everyone despite their sickness. So everyone who is sick of malaria, arthritis, diabetes, etc, are just given coatem.
So forgive me my fellow Zambians, especially praise singers and others that may be celebrating the IMF loan, but I will certainly not celebrate with you. This is not politics but my own opinion I made even before I ever joined politics, and something I have said throughout my political journey. I have said it consistently that we can raise our own resources in Zambia than rush to IMF loans. This is the view that president HH had while he was in opposition and I don’t know why and how he changed his mind, but some of us still hold that view.
Like many Development scholars, including our very own Dambisa Moyo said in her book DEAD AID, these loans have never developed any African country but instead just made us poorer and more dependant on the West. So maybe I have concentrated on politics of late and I have not updated my information on how African countries have been faring in the past few years, and if the situation has changed in regards our benefits to such loans. But what I can say is that debt dependency is a curse and not a blessing to us. I have shared how, among the many development paradigms, the Comparative Advantage one remains my favourite. It talks of how we should use what we have to develop. We have minerals, water, vast arable land, etc. Why always beg???
So forgive some of us, because we don’t make decisions and begin to celebrate things all because politicians and their allies say it’s good. We depend on our own analysis to make an opinion on the matter. Not that everyone who did Development Studies and Political Science will have my exact views, but my humble education passed me through a process where I am able to make my own informed view on the matter and not be swayed by other politicians and their praise singers. So I repeat- the IMF loan is NOT good for us. It has never been good and it will never be.
However, I would like to congratulate President HH and the UPND for finally getting this loan that they have been crying about. Some of us don’t want it, but the country has almost been on a standstill just waiting on this loan. They have placed too many solutions and almost every hope in getting this. So hope things will now be better according to what they have been telling us. Debt restructuring will now be possible and give them the much needed breather. It is the only thing I’m also happy for them for. And that is the advantage of being in the driving seat as a party or government. Because whatever all of us say, it remains their responsibility and decision to make as to whether we take such loans or not. The UPND and HH, you are deciding whether we drink tea or poison. And the IMF is poison, but you have decided that we take it, so this is what we shall drink as Zambians under your able leadership.
Lastly, you decided that we take this loan despite the facts that you already know. So congratulations for that and from the bottom of my heart and for the sake of Zambia, I really hope and pray that the results of this loan will be as you are saying and not the misery that has come with it on this continent, including our own country when we had to undergo the SAPs in the early 1990s. Because as always, it will be the poor that will suffer most from the consequences of this decision. The very praise singers will sing no more.
Saboi Imboela
President- NDC