Chibamba Kanyama writes
The article below is authored by Shebo Nalishebo, one of Zambia’s top statisticians with a bias to economics. He raises what I consider to be thought-provoking questions. They are worth analysing. I urge citizens,
Including corporate entities (as I advised one Board I was training this morning) to take huge interest in what’s happening:
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THE BLAME GAME: DID IMF PUT A GUN TO OUR HEADS TO BORROW US$12BN?
Shebo Nalishebo (06/12/2021)
I have been following the on-going debate about accessing the IMF package and would like to put out my 2 cents.
In Zambia, we fail to take responsibility and always blame “ba mwisa” for all our economic woes.
• After nationalising the mines in the 1970s and running down the economy for the next 2 decades, we blamed World Bank and IMF for the economic mess. Did they tell us not to reinvest in the mines and instead use the money from the mines on social services and blind-side the populace to the real economic costs? Nationalisation in Zambia failed. Yes, I said it! Our Southern neighbour, Botswana has harnessed Foreign Direct Investment, and it is working for them.
• All that debt we accumulated was written off under the HIPC programme. Just a decade or so later, we accumulated even much higher debt than before (in nominal terms), and we even added the more expensive commercial debt.
• After borrowing $12bn since the HIPC Completion Point and again run down the economy in the last 10 years, we are up in arms against the IMF that has effectively guaranteed our debt restructuring with our creditors.
• Didn’t we say we had set up a sinking fund to repay the loans? Did IMF ask us to employ cadres in ZESCO and RTSA? Did IMF tell us to waste the funds meant to revamp Zambia Railways? Did IMF make us overprice roads, fire-trucks, Gulf Stream aircraft, medicines and ambulances?
• The mining companies that we are vilifying now, have we forgotten that we run down the mines? Have we forgotten that the mines are actually the largest tax payers? Is it the mines’ fault that we have failed to grow our non-mining exports?
• We are instead calling for home-grown solutions. Haven’t we had 2 home-grown economic recovery programmes since 2017? By the way, we also had one in 1988. We have failed to implement these home-grown programmes. Are we going to turn around and blame the IMF for that too?
If you critically analyse these things, who really is to blame? Our own history has a lot of lessons we can learn from which we conveniently choose to forget.