ECONOMIC PLANS: THE PROBLEM IS NOT LACK OF PLANS BUT POOR IMPLEMENTATION!
By Alexander Nkosi
Our economic challenges cannot be blamed on lack of plans, we have produced very good plans, spelling out how to address our challenges. These are excellent documents produced by competent experts. These plans are developed by technocrats with wide consultation from both internal stakeholders and external experts. The biggest challenge is poor implementation, poor tracking of implementation, and lack of wide sharing of progress and impact results.
In Zambia, we have the vision 2030 developed by technocrats under the MMD regime. We have national development plans that are more detailed and feed into vision 2030. We have sectoral policies and strategies. We have annual budgets which are estimates of revenue and expenditure. The budget funds operations and programmes that are drawn from objectives in the national development plan. There is a medium term projection of revenue and expenditure called the medium term expenditure framework.
When there is change of government, it is not every plan and policy that needs changing. In most cases, all you need to do is to implement better. The PF regime did not develop vision 2030, it simply worked with what was developed by technocrats under MMD. When you look at 6th and 7th national development plans, these were very good documents, had they been implemented well, we would be much better. There was actually no need for economic recovery plans, we only needed to implement national development plans better. It can actually be argued that Zambia plus and the economic recovery plan were more of political tools to calm people down in view of deteriorating economic fundamentals such as high debt, depreciating kwacha and rising inflation. Before we got results of Zambia plus, we were given the economic recovery plan. What was the problem with Zambia plus that necessitated the change? What did we actually achieve with Zambia plus? Did anything change after introducing the economic recovery plan? Not at all! If anything, economic fundamentals worsened as we ended up with $12.9 billion external debt, K189.7 billion domestic debt and K46.9 billion domestic arrears. When you critically analyse the two recovery plans, you actually see that they talk about almost the same things.
Do we need more hastily done economic recovery plans or we just need a good debt management strategy and national development plan backed by good budgets? Good implementation, tracking of progress and communication of results are key!
Our debt management strategy hinges on the outcome of IMF deal and debt restructuring negotiations. This will give us a clear picture of how much space we will have and how we will progress while gravitating towards concessional borrowing to ensure we don’t find ourselves choked by huge debt service outlays. With regards to the IMF deal, we have staff level agreement and our debt restructuring discussions commence in a few months.
We also have a draft 8th national development plan in place which has been reviewed to align it to the UPND manifesto and whose objectives and conceptual orientation is already influencing our national budget and implementation of programmes. Policies are being reviewed for consistency, alignment and assessment of progress.
In conclusion, what we need to emphasise is good communication of plans, implementation and tracking of results. There is need for a very strong national monitoring and evaluation system. Without a good monitoring and evaluation system, we won’t know what is going well, what isn’t going well, course correction and effective communication of results. This should either be under state house or office of the vice President or even under cabinet office. If left under ministry of finance as a department, it will be subdued and lose the independence required to make it effective.
Thank you.