By Speedwell Mupuchi
LET us boldly vote PF out and elect another team with different and better skills-set to take full charge of the country, urges University of Zambia lecturer and researcher Vincent Kanyamuna.
Dr Kanyamuna holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Monitoring and Evaluation and is lecturer and researcher at the University of Zambia, Department of Development Studies.
Over the past seven weeks, he has run evaluations of the performance of the PF government and has concluded that the Edgar Lungu-led PF government has not performed.
His concluding column will be published in The Mast tomorrow.
He says his choice of the title was not deliberate to him but rather inevitable soon after he decided to review the performance of the PF regime using their own “Mother-Master-Plan, the Seventh National Development Plan (7NDP 2017-2021)”.
Dr Kanyamuna says while the 7NDP enjoyed applauds and accolades from among major stakeholders when it was launched in 2017, its implementation by the Lungu-led PF government had been a total disaster “to say the least”.
“Empirically, I demonstrated the pathetic performance of the 7NDP using study findings as encapsulated in the 7NDP Mid-Term Review Report. My facts cannot be denied even by President Edgar Lungu himself, not even by any of his top PF leadership. I have illustrated how LIP-SERVICE was the only major meal the Edgar Lungu-led PF government served on the table for the Zambians to feed on,” Dr Kanymuna says. “It explains why today the country was hurting socio-economically more than at any other time in our history. Thus, as I conclude on this topic, I still maintain that the Edgar Lungu-led PF government has not performed.”
He says he was even more convinced now than he was when he wrote Part 1 and strongly suggests to Zambians that since it was possible to replace the PF through a democratic vote on 12th August (next month), “let us boldly vote them out and elect another team with different and better skills-set to take full charge of the country”.
“That, in my view will be doing our country a huge favour and our great-great-grandchildren will forever be happy with our monumental decision,” he says.
Dr Kanyamuna urges Zambians not to lose focus as he was an ardent advocate of good governance through the adoption and utilisation of both Results Based Management (RBM) approach and Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) principles.
He says it had been possible for him to ask performance questions about any intervention under any sector – public or private – using RBM and M&E lens to engage the development arena.
“And because national development plans (NDPs) are the vehicles used to develop a country and a mechanism upon which public resources were disbursed by-and-large, I easily decided to study the results thus far achieved by the PF regime for the 7NDP at Mid-Term. For most of the performance indicators in the Plan, they were measured and rated as being ‘OFF-TRACK’,” Dr Kanyamuna says. “Many others were also rated to be ‘PARTIALLY ON TRACK’ and only a few were found to be ‘ON-TRACK’. This calls for anger by every responsible citizen because the 7NDP was largely implemented when Zambia had a government that did a very bad job with regard to adhering to good governance tenets.”
He illustrated his conclusion that between 2015 and 2020, the PF government deceived people by failing to come out clean on various scandals and “what I call socio-economic SINS or INIQUITIES”.
“As I end, the PF regime is led by our brothers and sisters – good for nothing siblings. Zambians should not permit the PF to ruin the country further. We can pass on the governance baton of our country’s affairs to another capable and cautious team and political party. I am certain that a change to another regime is far much better than no change at all,” says Dr Kanyamuna.