WHAT DID ZAMBIA GET FROM THE US VICE PRESIDENT KAMALA HARRIS’S RECENT VISIT?
Months before and during her visit to Zambia, both mainstream and social media were buzzing about Kamala Harris, including sharing tells about a possible house somewhere along Independence Avenue road. What did we get from this visit?
Comrade Vijay Prashad, Executive Director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research notes that from Kamala Harris’s visit to Ghana the country merely got a ‘technical advisor’, Lazard to advise the government on their debt crisis rather than efforts aimed at putting pressure on the “wealthy bondholders to cancel some of the debt … or to extend a moratorium on debt servicing payments.”
Comrade Prashad writes:
“Remarkably, during her visit to Ghana in late March 2023, US Vice President Kamala Harris announced that the US Treasury Department’s Office of Technical Assistance will ‘deploy a full-time resident advisor in 2023 to Accra to assist the Ministry of Finance in developing and executing medium- to long-term reforms needed to improve debt sustainability and support a competitive, dynamic government debt market’. Ghana certainly faces significant challenges in this arena, with its external debt standing at $36 billion and its debt to Gross Domestic Product ratio hovering over 100 percent. As Harris left Accra, Reuters reported that Ghana had hired the Bermuda-based financial advisor Lazard to represent it in talks with the Paris-based Rothschild & Co., which will represent the international bondholders that are the largest creditors of this cash-strapped nation. Rather than pressure these wealthy bondholders to cancel some of the debt (what is known as a ‘haircut’) or to extend a moratorium on debt servicing payments, the US government merely provided Ghana with a ‘technical advisor’.”
(Read further at: http://thetricontinental.org/)
(Image credit: Tricontinental Institute for Social Research)
Fred M’membe,
President of the Socialist Party Zambia