HH, Musokotwane, IMF and the West: fooling poor Zambians as they organise the foreign plunder of our country and its people
By Azwell Banda
When he was in Davos at the World Economic Forum where he was representing President Hakainde Hichilema, our Minister of Finance and National Planning Situmbeko Musokotwane gushed with self-importance and satisfaction at the fact that Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, would be visiting Zambia.
Musokotwane made it very clear that the very busy IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva would not waste time visiting Zambia if Zambia was “not doing the right thing”. Musokotwane said high profile personalities would continue to visit Zambia because, once again, Zambia has progressive and bright prospects for cooperation and economic transformation. We have since hosted Kristalina Georgieva and of course US Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen. These are indeed two of some of the very powerful women in the world today. Both are extremely important to the global capitalist finance system. They share the responsibility of ensuring the global financial system is stable, healthy, and that nation states, banks, money and profit mongers all behave in ways that sustain private accumulation of money and wealth, especially for US big corporations.
Situmbeko Musokotwane is therefore right in a sort of perverted sick sense: Hakainde Hichilema, Musokotwane and the UPND government, for the first time in the history of Zambia, are openly for, and advance the interests of banks, money and profit mongers above all else. They are doing everything they can to make Zambia “attractive” to foreign money, something they share in common with Janet Yellen and Kristalina Georgieva. They are doing “the right thing”.
Unashamedly and in the presence of the media, Musokotwane perfectly explained the essence of the UPND “economic policy” when he was welcoming US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen:
“It is our wish that investors come. I want to appeal to you that in the manner of cooperation, what I am saying means that we reduce gradually, the issue of begging and giving, and promote the issue of investment, self-reliance and so forth. So we hope we can convince the American corporations and American investors to look at the positive strides that are being made in this country to come and take advantage of the profit opportunities,” Musokotwane said. “We want companies that come here to make profits because if they do not make profits, they cannot sustain jobs, they cannot pay taxes, they cannot be useful to us. So, tell them out there that in Zambia there are opportunities for making big money and then they must pay some tax. The amount of money they will make in profits exceeds the taxes they will have to pay.”
Musokotwane, feeling very proud of himself, obviously. There were a few chuckles at this blunt appeal for foreign money to come and loot and plunder us. As I watched this extremely humiliating performance by Situmbeko Musokotwane in front of an individual responsible for the world’s largest and most rapacious armed capitalist economy and state on earth, I cringed inside myself at the naivety of the grovelling and self-ingratiating quality of the performance by our Minister of Finance and National Planning. Janet Yellen knows the history of US slavery, the struggle to nearly exterminate native Americans, the American Civil War, US colonialism and how inevitably the racist US capitalist class grew to produce some of the world’s most cunning, ruthless, exploitative capitalists and oligarchies who have sustained the US as the world’s economic and military nuclear supper power.
True American rapacious capitalists do not need a petty lecture from Zambia conveyed to them through Janet Yellen, to decide whether Zambia was ripe for their financial invasion! Besides, Janet Yellen, the US Embassy, USAID office in Zambia, US AFRICOM Office, the IMF and World Bank and the bevy of US spies and their friends in Zambia know far more about Zambia than Situmbeko Musokotwane ever will, actually!
We have been here before, like a lonely aging male or female prostitute out in the cold night of Lusaka streets in June, hoping that a sex buyer will see the prostitute’s offerings and choose him or her, in a street clogged with other younger, more attractive prostitutes. All the while, the prostitute is fully aware how precarious, dangerous, unpredictable and thoroughly unreliable the trade of prostitution is. There are bad and good days, mostly bad, these days. The children and other dependents at home depend absolutely on the fortuitous whims of those who pay for, and consume, the services of prostitutes to eat, have a place to sleep and hopefully children continue going to school too.
In this day and age, as major world geopolitical and economic changes take place, amidst the most obvious signs of the terminal collapse of the global capitalist system as we have known it, no sane politician in any government can rely on phantom, fictitious foreign “investors” especially from the US, to pull an impoverished country such as Zambia is, out of its poverty, and to develop it. HH, Musokotwane and the UPND leadership are completely out of sync with the global economic and political tectonic shifts currently under way. Done, Musokotwane sat back in his chair, quite exhausted, but happy he had done a great job, and listened to the very brief response from Janet Yellen!
Both HH and Musokotwane lamented and begged these two very powerful women to get the stalled Zambian debt restructuring process “unlocked” and concluded expeditiously, as this was holding back the expected influx of foreign money for private profits, into Zambia. Hakainde Hichilema moaned that the delays in concluding the debt negotiation processes threaten to undo the “stabilisation” work his government has secured so far. Both HH and Musokotwane know and made it very clear to these two powerful women in the world of global capitalism that Zambia has done everything it was supposed to do, and was now waiting for others to do their bits.
Both powerful women made inconsequential noises to get our creditors to move a little bit fast, and get done what needs to be done, for Zambia to get the debt relief it is begging for, by punishing poor Zambians with severe austerity measures.
The bitter truth is no one on earth today can command our complex composition of creditors to quickly take a haircut and lose some of their anticipated massive profits on the money Zambia borrowed, and set another precedence that a poor country can somehow, under the supervision of the IMF, escape paying its full debt, that easily. Again the naivety, all round, of such an assumption is breath taking, especially in the current problematic global economic and political environment. This explains why Zambia is almost alone on this chaotic debt restructuring “programme”. Many countries are watching us, and hoping to learn vital lessons from our very green and naïve politicians, in the UPND government.
A pathetic effort was made to humanise the IMF, sanitise it, and distort Zambia’s relationship to the IMF and our history with it, especially by Hakainde Hichilema and Kristalina Georgieva herself. In classic lying HH form, Hakainde strained himself to persuade Zambia that it is a misconception to think that the IMF is a difficult organisation, that it does not help countries to succeed, that the IMF is actually not a “foreign” organisation, that it is not an entity owned by certain people. This man deserves an Olympic Gold Medal for distorting reality, for lying! HH says we own the IMF. He says the IMF is our creation. The IMF works for us. Unbelievable! HH lives on another planet, as yet undiscovered.
Zambia has an insignificant share in the IMF, around 0.22 per cent, which means its votes virtually count for nothing, which is why it is none other than the current General Secretary of the UN who has called for reforming the IMF and other global financial organisations similar to it, because they are controlled by a few powerful countries to the great detriment of consciously impoverished and underdeveloped countries such as Zambia. The US in fact has effectively the power of veto on all major decisions of both the IMF and World Bank.
But it is the deliberate ignoring, distortion and sanitisation of our history with the IMF which perfectly confirms whose interests HH and his UPND government are serving: global money mongers and private profiteers, and therefore the IMF which regulates their financial conduct! The IMF is also responsible for our historic poverty levels. This evidence is all over the internet.
Zambians who care to know and truly love Zambia must ask whether they want to continue to pretend that in HH and the UPND we have a genuine Zambian government!
Comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com.