By Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba
IMF has never delivered success anywhere
International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director, Dr. Nigel Clarke, is in Zambia on a 3-day working visit to discuss progress made under the Fund supported programmes, and the debt restructuring exercise.
In the last 3 years, the IMF approved an Extended Credit Facility (ECF) for Zambia in 2022, providing a $1.3 billion loan program over 38 months.
To address the country’s drought and continued economic challenges, the IMF provided an increased as an augmentation of access under the ECF, bringing the total funding to $1.7 billion.
IMF’s driven liberal programs and forced privatisation program of state-owned enterprises in the 90s are behind Zambia’s de-industralisation and rapid fall into high poverty levels and high unemployment rates.
The IMF has been criticized for its loan conditions, interventions, and structure.
The IMF loans and policies cause the following harm:
1. Create dependency
The IMF’s safety net encourages reckless economic policies and delays reforms, creating long-term dependency.
2. Harm the poor
Austere loan conditions and uniform policy prescriptions deepen financial crises and disproportionately hurt the poorest people.
3. Damage economies
IMF interventions in impoverished countries are overly ambitious and intrusive, and loan conditions are out of touch with reality.
Rescue bad investments
The IMF rescues international bankers who make bad loans, encouraging riskier investments.
4. Lack accountability
The IMF is immune from legal action, and its opaque investments make it difficult for communities to hold it accountable. The damage done to the economy in the 90s by their Structural Adjustment Program can never be atoned.
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were a set of economic policies implemented by the IMF and the World Bank to address economic crises in developing countries had negative impacts on social welfare and undermined national sovereignty. The programs increased poverty, decreased economic stability, and negative failure to achieve long-term economic growth.
5. Act as gatekeepers
The IMF, with member states help create and choose NGOs to act as echo chambers to manifacture purported public consesus.
6. Promotes Neo-liberalism
The IMF has imposed neoliberal policies like privatization and free markets on developing countries without recourse to local conditions and state of economies.
So where do they teach that, Emmanuel Mwamba? Do you know that Britain has borrowed from the IMF before? Ditto Brazil, Chile, India, Thailand, Malaysia.
So where do they teach that, Emmanuel Mwamba? Britain has borrowed from the IMF before. Ditto Brazil, Chile, Mauritius, Thailand etc.
Emma since chiluba you have been in GRZ so what are you telling us now
Emmanuel mwamba is a fool, that is why these opposition which comprises of pf blood will never rule again, imf has helped this country alot but a foolish individual is saying they have not helped any country, that is completely having no message to tell the Zambian people ,sometimes even calling these people honorable is just insulting because they don’t qualify
HAAKWASIYA,
Are you still allowed to call someone a fool? Do you have immunity from prosecution? So you think the cyber laws do not apply to you HAAKWASIYA? What is so special about you HAAKWASIYA?
Reject tribalism, corruption and oppression.
God bless Why Me and Captain Ibrahim Traore.
Vote for change in 2026.
On this one fugitive Mwamba you are correct. And to all those calling this man Ambassador he is not an ambassador, he is a fugitive, so going forward refer to him as fugitive Mwamba. But on IMF the fugitive is spot on and countries like ours need to heed and look within for solutions, the propensity to have our eyes on the next flight at the sausage airport will always make us miss the local solutions because of our eyes on the sausage airport. Zambia has enough resources to see us through the problems we currently experience