PURPOSE OF ENTRY: TO WIND UP AND LEAVE THE COUNTRY

Today Brendan Manning, shareholder and manager of a company holding an investment certificate under the Investment Act, with an investment in rural Zambia over four years of $1.6 million, received a temporary permit extension at a cost of K2.5 million (kwacha @ 3850 to the $ dollar) or $649 - although the TP only admits to the payment of K2 million. This permit - supposedly issued on 24 October and valid to 24 January 2008, despite Immigration receiving a lawyers letter and a personal visit to ensure that the TP be valid up to the holding of the court case, is but six days short of the High Court case, one in which he and his father and mother have their judicial review hearing against the Minister of Home Affairs and the Chief Immigration Officer on the matter of the latter's refusal to extend the Mannings self-employed permits. Judge Musonda, having on 30 November admonished the Immigration Department for arrogance and disrespect of the High Court in that they have been issuing short-stay permits despite a judicial stay being in place, something which supersedes any action, may now wish to deal with a state body which ignores him.

The matter is not simply that Immigration require money to pay the Chinese contractor for his attempted repairs to the notorious Kent House, but that the executive and the civil service - paid for by tax payers and the ubiquitous donors - including my own fatherland, not least all the IT equipment supplied by USAID, appear to hold the High Court in contempt. I think, however, that in Judge Musonda they may have found their match.

Today came news of a divorcee on a work permit with a young child of 4, who, enrolled at a private school, and has been told that she should pay K500,000 for a study permit for the child.

NGOs in Zambia...

The Zambian State and civil society do not very often sing from the same hymn sheet - and increasingly so in Zambia. But this is not a particularly Zambian malady: government everywhere always grows increasingly intolerant of criticism, be it from the media or from that product of western pluralism, the non-government organization. And one cannot cavil at the man who is the citizen's protector - the Minister of Justice, saying that there needs to be a legal framework in place for the protection of society from unregulated NGOs - some of them undoubtedly not of charitable intent. The Charities Commission in England oversee many thousands of NGOs, making sure that they serve society. It is a difficult job, and they have a legal framework, based - as is ours, on English Common Law. But they also protect NGOs from the Government.

Zambian NGOs clearly see the NGO Bill as a move by Government to stifle opposition to government policies and their implementation through Acts and Statutory Instruments, and as an instrument to divide and conquer the myriad groupings of charitable intent which might coalesce into hard political opposition. The Bill does of course not much consider the protection of the NGO from a Government, one that does not hesitate to order the OP surveillance team to keep a close watch on it. As Joyce MacMillan remarks, the restrictive definition of an NGO would pose a threat to those of us working in human rights, social and economic justice - if you are trying to do charitable works in a rural area, something impossible to avoid.

What this bill would deliver is the establishment of a Government controlled quango , yet another one, to oversee the common herd. By all means let us have a commission, but one appointed - unlike the Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission, by civil society.

All free men and women need to restrict the powers of the elected government over them.

Justice being done in Zambia…

Today, I and my son, Brendan, attended a judicial review in a Lusaka High Court judge’s chambers, together with our attorney, Wynter Kabimba and a legal officer from the Attorney-General’s office. The matter of course has to do with the refusal of the Minister of Home Affairs to renew our self-employed permits - as is our right as holders of investment certificates under the Zambia Development Agency Act of 2006, giving as his reason that “Your business is not viable”, even though we are only into our third year and have already invested $1.6 million in our Luembe Conservancy – a partnership with our Luembe community, which includes the purchase of the hunting concessionaire in our conservancy, Mbeza Safaris.

The judge showed some irritation at a move by the Government who today presented an affidavit to have the review cancelled, having had time since we last appeared before the same judge on 4 September to present it. Our attorney then, given the fact that he had had no time to consult us, requested an adjournment. This was granted, the date being set for 30 January, 2008.

Then the matter of the Immigration Department’s refusal to understand that a stay of execution granted us on 4 September meant just that. But of course Immigration do not have much understanding or respect for the law, being filled with the hubris of their most powerful position to grant ‘life and death’ in Zambia to investors, be they illiterate Chinese labourers whom we encounter every time we attend Immigration, putting their crosses on the receipts for their entry permits, something denied most investors, even the husband of a chum of mine who has been on a work permit since 1975. There are four of us: my wife and son and I (all executive shareholders of the company holding an investment certificate), and my aged mother, so Immigration is quite happy to have us paying our $500 application fee for a temporary permit for a few weeks or months, even though they know the date of the judicial review and could easily issue us with a free report order. After all they should have some rudimentary understanding of the fact that a stay of execution granted by a High Court judge supercedes everything. I tried explaining this to the Immigration legal officer a few days ago. But he clearly thought he was an expert, denying that a stay meant any such thing, then turned on my wife who has been on a report order, saying that unless she paid for and received a temporary permit, he could arrest her for being in the country illegally. This was abuse in its most basic form, something you have to get used to when dealing with the Kent House brigade.

Our problems with Immigration were put to the judge, who stated that the Immigration legal officer was clearly being ‘disrespective to the court, and being arrogant…” With great restraint, he suggested that the Government legal officer have a word with the Immigration legal officer so that he would not be forced to come down on her with a court order!!

Today on the 31st October, we delivered a letter to The Chief Immigration Officer from our attorneys, which dealt with the question, writing as follows: "your (Immigration's) office has continued to act in disobedience of the judicial order granted to them (Mannings) by a competent court by issuing them at times with report orders for a period of 3 days or a Temporary permit for a period of a month. It was the view of the judge (Honourable Mr Justice Phillip Musonda) that your conduct constitutes an affront to the judicial order granted and M/s Mpamba as legal officer was expected to be well versed in court matters and advise your office accordingly. The judge directed that we implore you to obey the court order in order to facilitate a fair trial or in default to promptly report to the court for appropriate action. In this regard you may wish to refer to the case of Kabimba Vs the Attorney General and Lusaka City Council (1995/97) ZR, 152 for the definition of a stay and its effect in judicial review proceedings."

It was concluded by a receptive and polite senior hierarchy at Immigration - and by our attorney, that we should be issued Temporary Permits for three months - for which we would have to pay.

Foreigners flood Zambia reports ZNBC...

"The Immigrations Department says Zambia has recorded an unprecedented influx of foreign nationals due to investment prospects in the country. Chief Immigrations Officer, Ndiyoyi Mutiti said government's resolve to woo investment into the country has attracted many foreign nationals. Mrs. Mutiti also refuted allegations that more work permits are being issued to Chinese nationals than other foreigners. She said her department does not discriminate when issuing work permits. There has been reports that Chinese nationals are awarded more work permits than other foreigners."

Evidence of Zambia's Development and Immigration divide...

That Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry, Felix Mutati complains of an influx of Chinese labourers into Zambia - labourers almost daily to be found squatting on the pavement outside the Lusaka airport awaiting their buses, but further confirmation that the Ministry of Home Affairs and its Department of Immigration are implementing a plan which Commerce and Industry have no control over. As I have an Immigration Department official on record as saying that it is they who decide who comes to - or leaves, Zambia, clearly investors have a problem, being lead down the garden path by the Ministry of Commerce - through its Zambia Development Agency, and abandoned to the the vagaries of a heavily politicised Department of Emigration. Chinese and miners be welcome, others beware!

On Tuesday 30 October, the High Court of Zambia will decide on just such a case. Watch this blog... and as a reminder of the problem, here is repeated part of a blog of some months ago dealing with the 'Adequacy of Zambia's Legal and Policy Framework' which I contributed to the Committee on Economic Affairs and Labour of the National Assembly, Zambia:

INTRODUCTION
The Zambia Development Agency Act No. 11 of 2006 takes the place of the repealed Acts: Investment Act; Privatization Act; Small Enterprise Development Act; Export Processing Zones Act; and the Export Development Act, creating the quango: The Zambia Development Agency

THE ACT’S ADEQUACY:

i) The national investment objectives
These are articulated based on generally accepted international norms. However, it is clear that, in their making, they are not the result of true consultation with civil society conducted in a transparent and participatory manner as they do not address the cultural and socio-wellsprings of society, and therefore will remain an idealistic goal ever unattainable. In plain terms, the objectives are not the views of general society.
ii) Government responsibilities to foreign investors
These are poorly delineated, leaving the investor, should anything go wrong, at the mercy of the Arbitration Act, a process anyhow avoided by a Government Executive in which power remains highly centralized, where foreign investors are able to be deported under emergency powers introduced to deal with a state of emergency under a previous regime. There therefore needs to be introduced a special committee of the judiciary, set apart from the Executive, to deal with matters affecting investors who are targeted by corrupt elements.

A backdrop to the conservation battle in Zambia...

Nicholas F. Benton: China’s Resource Grab in Africa
Thursday, 25 October 2007
nfbenton@fcnp.com
My exclusive interview this week with a leading health official from the U.S. working on the AIDS crisis in Zambia, Africa, revealed conditions on the ground there almost too horrible to describe. There is no one critical problem there that is not interlinked with at least a half-dozen others and the conventional wisdom is that the best case scenario for a turnaround is at least 40 years away. But as far as the U.S. or any Western interests are concerned, that day will likely never come, since their current foreign policy vacuum in that region has left it to strident and persistent advances by the Chinese.

China is moving into the most ravaged areas of Africa with no humanitarian intent. On the contrary, the Chinese are capitalizing on the corruption at the top of governments there to trade financial payoffs for titles to massive chunks of land rich in untapped natural resources. The U.S. has turned its back to this process, from combined diplomatic, geopolitical and financial aid standpoints, because of its preoccupation with Iraq, the official said.

So the unspeakable human crisis there is not only a matter of concern for the people in that region, but for the wider global interests of the U.S., as well. The U.S. is stuck in the Iraq quagmire, having expended over $500 billion there to date, in an intended oil grab against perceived Russian and Chinese designs. Yet because of that, it is permitting access to even more vital resources in Africa and elsewhere to the same strategic competitors, over the poverty-stricken and disease-riddled rotting bodies of millions. It is impossible to imagine anything but a massive shift of focus by the U.S. and its allies to turn this regrettable inevitability around.

As it is now, up to 40 percent of the population of Zambia and surrounding countries is infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS. In Zambia, because of AIDS, the average life expectancy has dropped from 57 to 37 years of age in 20 years. One out of every two children born there today will die from AIDS-related factors before age 24. The death rate has created a massive displaced children problem and the local government has no interest in setting up orphanages. Instead, these AIDS orphans either move in with extended family members, live on the streets or are periodically rounded up into military camps.

These children are then either recruited into the exploding trend of child soldiers used as fodder in genocidal tribal wars, or into global human trafficking networks, shipped around the world and forced to become sex workers. The primary destinations of these networks are the large coastal urban centers of the U.S., the official said. Neither condoms nor AIDS drugs are working in arresting the spread of HIV in Zambia, she added, noting that cultural mores and a pervasive sense of despair make them ineffective. People living in conditions of extreme poverty have no energy to think beyond how they’re going to eat from day to day, and have no sense that they could work for a better future for themselves, or their children, in the long term. There is simply no notion of opportunities for a better life. Foreign aids organizations are treated with great suspicion, with Afro-Americans from the U.S. being considered “white.” The suspicions are fueled by local witch doctors whose prescriptions for virility encourage sexual practices by adults with young children too heinous to describe explicitly. Polygamy, without the formality of marriage or commitment, is the norm.

Corrupt local leaders hold aid efforts at bay, demanding huge bribes and diverting resources for their own uses. And there is simply no way the U.S. or any other outside nation can carry out programs in those countries without the blessings of those leaders. There appears to be no sweeping proposal for a “silver bullet” to fix all this. The only way to start, however, would be for the global community, most importantly the U.S., to begin fixing its gaze on what’s happening there, not only from a humanitarian but from a geo-strategic standpoint.

BAA corporate members at the African front...

As a tiny corporate member of Business Action for Africa (BAA) actually working in the field as an investor and holistic developer in an isolated part of Zambia where some 5,000 or so people live on about 25 cents a day - in a country where Government over the last 20 years only spent 16% of its national expenditure on agriculture, health, education and local government, and where corruption is kept alive by the very process of donor aid, any effort to encourage corporates on the Corporate Social Responsiblity (CSR) front is laudable (I am trying to recruit corporates to invest in conservancies, based on a trust structure, where they can get involved on the ground). However, not much is being done to support us and the 25 centers in the field, all the endless talking, thumb-shakes and cocktails being swilled in London far from the front. Corruption is a case in point. BAA makes much of its anti-corruption stance, even reporting to the G8 on what a fine job it has done in Zambia, yet I see nothing of them here, nor do they bother to reply to my letters asking what it is they actually do here – let alone for their own members, one of whom is the subject of surveillance and harassment by the state security and immigration apparatus simply because he stands up for the poor and opposes illegal land alienations. But are they listening?

The donors and the multi-nationals, the quangos and international organizations are simply in bed with the Government, massaging the slumbers of the poor. These be the waPajero, a new species. What to do?

Zambia’s Wildlife Authority Board Chairman threatens investor...

Since the Mulungushi Truce Conference of 3 January, 2007 (see Bush Telegraph) - a meeting of hunting concession Community Resource Boards, safari operators and ZAWA, called by Minister Pande of the Ministry of Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources in order to arrange a truce in the mounting criticism of Government's handling of the hunting and conservation industry, only one meeting of the industry has been held, and that without the Community Resource Boards being present. If Government does not confer with its private sector partners, with its community partners, if it ignores its problems, is unsympathetic, then criticism will appear in the media, particularly in the greatest liberating influence known to mankind, the Internet.

The letter from the Chairman of the Zambia Wildlife Authority is chilling: "...show cause why the Board of ZAWA should not deal with your menacing behaviour in a manner and style that should put the scourge to complete rest, decisively and once and for all." Sounds like a death threat.

My reply follows below:

3 October, 2007.

Walusiku Lisulo
Chairman of the ZAWA Board
Your ref: WL/JJ/889

Dear Sir,

Your letter of 26 September was received by hand today.

Your charge that I am posting articles on the internet which are libelous of ZAWA, its Board and the Director-General, requires investigation. As you are making a general accusation, I would presume that you have at hand those articles you consider libelous and could point them out to me. Once we have something with which to debate, I will gladly attend a meeting with the ZAWA Board, attended of course by my attorney. You, of course, already have details of my dissatisfaction with ZAWA and its Board and are, I am sure, ready to supply answers and explanations – something long sought after and promised by you at the Mulugushi Truce meeting in January of this year, and at two subsequent meetings.

I must state for the record, that although I am not required to attend any meeting on the command of ZAWA, or the full Board, I shall do so in the interests of the truth and of conservation. As a conservationist of long standing in Zambia, what I do is only in the interests of Zambia, its people and its wildlife. I am prepared to defend that.

Your sincerely,


I.P.A. Manning

cc. The DG. ZAWA.
cc. The Minister. MTENR.
cc. W.M. Kabimba & Associates

Zambia’s Wildlife Authority again rides rough shod over hunting safari investors…

Zambia’s newspaper, ‘The Post’ of 3 October 2007, carries a Zambia Wildlife Authority tender for the granting of a “ Safari Hunting Concession in Nyampala Hunting Block: Munyamadzi Game Management Area”. Nothing unusual in that you might say, except for the fact that there still exists a legal concessionaire of Nyampala, Leopard Ridge Safaris. ZAWA appears to have forgotten that they removed the concession from Leopard Ridge without due process, that the concession was re-instated by the Lusaka High Court in favour of Leopard Ridge, and that they then appealed to the Supreme Court – the case which is to be heard on 23 October 2007. ZAWA’s legal advisor appears not to have informed his Director-General that such a tender prejudices the Supreme Court appeal.

And one must not forget that the Nyampala Community Resource Board, the partner in the Hunting Concession Agreement - along with ZAWA and Leopard Ridge, had obtained their own High Court injunction, allowing Leopard Ridge to continue hunting, later overturned on purely procedural grounds in the Supreme Court, a terrible blow against rural residents of hunting concessions. Of course, when this happened, ZAWA sent in a force of paramilitary and their own schutztruppe at 4.00 am into one of Leopard Ridge’s camps, ordering Leopard Ridge to close down and depart the area. I wonder what the client whom they had hunting thought of it all.

And Leopard Ridge is also due to appear in court again – along with a few other companies, including our own, in yet another action brought by the National Movement Against Corruption against us, despite them having already lost in the High Court (with costs) and, the Supreme Court. The case? We had overshot our game hunting quotas they charged, something unproven and untrue. But NAMAC, it appeared, believed that their real intention was to expose some corrupt elements in ZAWA who had done nothing about bringing us miscreants to justice. It is all a little far fetched.

As we speak, our lawyer awaits a bundle of documents from the NAMAC lawyer so that the fresh action may commence.

So, it appears that NAMAC, rather than fighting corruption, is an unwitting part of it. If you look at Leopard Ridge’s situation and the case of Ed Smythe – an operator who simply had his concession removed and given ‘administratively’ to someone else, it is hard to dispute. And who is it that funds NAMAC, supposedly there to fight corruption itself? The Danish Government.

Are they aware of how their money is being mis-used?

Zambia for the Zambians...

Sherry Thole, Chairman of the Implementation Committee of the USAID funded, Private Sector Reform Programme (PSRP) currently being hosted by the Zambia Business Forum, addressed its convention earlier this year, stating," Zambia for the Zambians!"

Zambia: Mwanawasa Assures Investors ?

The Times of Zambia (Ndola)
19 September 2007

Ndola
President Mwanawasa has assured investors wishing to come to Zambia of conducive policies and protection for their investment while upholding the interests of local people.

Comment by IM:
Amnesty International report that since the last election there is “widespread harassment and intimidation of people perceived to be critical of the government.”

Zambia whistleblower fall-out on the rural poor…

On the 20th August of 2007, senior representatives of the villagers living within the Luembe Chiefdom of Zambia, went to have their application endorsed for the formation of the Luembe Development and Caretaker Community Association. In order to do this, as required by the Registrar of Societies in Lusaka, they were compelled to obtain the signatures of the Nyimba District Council and the Nyimba Police. They duly obtained these, but, unusually – as it is not normally required, they were told by the Council to obtain the signature of the District Intelligence Officer in the Office of the President (OP), Nyimba branch. Then came the surprise, the officer, by the name of G.K. Mumba, stated that he knew that the group were connected with me, and that I had posted on my blogs the news that his office had recently gone in to Luembe to investigate our complaints of an elephant ivory and bushmeat poaching ring being operated by Zambia Wildlife Authority personnel. The village leaders were upbraided for having given secret information to someone who had then used it for ‘economic sabotage against Zambia’ by telling the world that the OP, as they are called, were investigating corruption. When asked how this was economic sabotage, Mumba replied that I had sought to dissuade hunting clients from coming to Zambia on safari by telling them of the poaching and other corruption.

The irony here is that as a result of being a whistleblower of the massive poaching ring operating in the district, I had also sought to publicize illegal land alienations of customary land and National Forest involving corrupt local forestry and wildlife officers, a corrupt Chief, corrupt elements within the Nyimba District Council, corrupt businessmen, and corruption in the Ministry of Lands. As a result, I had been accused by State House of plotting to overthrow the ruling MMD Government, of planning the destruction of the maize stocks of Zambia; accused by one of the Chiefs in the district of having committed game offences – though I had not ever hunted in his area; had my phones and emails tapped and my house placed under surveillance and, in my absence, my wife had suffered an invasion of the property by thugs; and then, in an act of sabotage which impacts both on our business, on the local community – as they share income from safaris, and on the good name of Zambia, had our client agents told that we were no good – immediate cancellations being the instant result. Whom is sabotaging whom, I ask.

Of course the Luembe community are awakening from their slumbers, now being aware of their rights under the law and the Constitution. Having got rid their chief for selling off their land, they found him reinstated without due customary process, and are oncemore fighting to have him ousted. Daily their wildlife resources and elephant are being plundered by the very people mandated to protect them. Not only has development aid passed them by, but they have to bear the yoke of malign interests seeking to further disenfranchise them. They now realize all this; hence their wish to form an Association, a perfectly normal democratic urge. But now the OP has put the spell on them.

Political scientist says Zambia Government is using foreign investors as scapegoats...

The Zambian academic and leading commentator on current affairs, Dr Neo Simutanyi, in his article 'Education and the Criminal Economy' says that the Department of Immigration, acting on instructions from above, are throwing some foreigners out of the country who are legally here; being used as scapegoats for government policy failures.

High Court Judge extends date of stay of execution...

Yesterday a High Court judge heard, inter partes, the question of the stay of execution granted to me against the decision of the Minister of Home Affairs not to renew my self-employed permit. It was agreed by the respondents' attorney that the stay be extended until 30 October, 2007, at which time the judicial review will be heard, the Minister and the Chief Immigration Officer being required to give good legal reasons for their action in refusing me that which Zambia is required to honour.

That a bona fide investor, holding an Investment Certificate, and supposedly protected by the Investment Act , should be so treated is an act of bad faith and does not send out a message to would-be investors to come to Zambia and trust the actions of politicians and a heavily politicised Immigration Department. As a corporate member of Business Action for Africa, I will be making a complaint. So far the Zambia Development Agency, required to protect an investor's rights, has failed to act.

Zambia Development Agency speak...

Cartoon from The Oldie magazine.

Zambia High Court Action by I.P.A. Manning against the Minister of Home Affairs etc...

A letter to the IMF...I.P.A. Manning

The continued IMF propping up of Zambia simply perpetuates dependency, corruption and Zambia's deepening dysfunctional state.

As someone working here in the trenches on and off since 1963, I, like
many old Africa hands, are in despair. Corruption here is rampant and
worsening,with ever greater amounts of money being stolen. You talk
of poverty reduction while only 16% of national expenditure has gone
over the last two decades on the very things needed to alleviate poverty:
agriculture, health, education, and district councils. You talk of
stimulating investment while small investors, the ones who create jobs
and develop societies, are being shown the door, their self-employed
work permits denied, in total contempt of their investment
certificates and the Investment Act which underpins them. The rape of
the environment continues apace with customary communities
increasingly disenfranchised, the biodiversity being pillaged, with
ever increasing centralization of powers in an inept and clueless
administration. Since the infamous Watershed speech of June, 1975,
this country rid itself of virtually all non-Zambian civil servants, and
continues, in defiance of international standards, to ignore the rights
of its non-Zambian residents to a place in Zambian society, a place
where speaking out against corruption and the illegal alienation of
land should not be taken as sedition and an attack on state security.
Zambia is now openly anti-western, anti-globalization, the producer
of laws and bills and statutory instruments which infringe on civil
liberties, on our rights and on the rights of the rural poor in
particular, yet it knows that its palm will continue to be greased by
donors who have lost all touch with reality as they jet about the
world greasing up indigenous magnificent failures. And for the IMF
to even seriously discuss yet another National Development Plan,
shows how bankrupt the IMF and World Bank ideas bank has become.

What we need is less aid, more open investment, immigration, smart-
partnerships, less planning and the propping up of corrupt
departments, the financing of deeply flawed consultancy reports.
Perhaps you should visit one of our far-flung rural areas so that you
may inspect land untouched - except by the plunderers, since the
coming of Livingstone in 1868. Certainly you will be hard pressed to
see where all the money you have given - in some two dozen or so IMF
bail-outs, has gone.

Suljani comments on the CEE Act, Manning replies...

Suljani, on http://ipamanning.blogspot.com (now changed), made comments on my article on the CEE Act (see article on this blog)
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Mr Manning, I just want to respond to your comments and correct some of your history about Zambia.

I am the great grandson of Donald Siwale who was amongst the group of Zambians that began the first organised struggle against colonial rule in 1912. They formed what was called the Mwenzo Welfare Association with David Kaunda (father to Kenneth Kaunda), Peter Sinkala and others. I was fortunate enough to talk to my great grandfather before he died in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was a young boy but I remember he used to talk about what he called "Colour Bar" that was practiced by the Colonial Administration before independence. In other words, there were separate inferior schools and other public services for blacks, indians and coloureds whereas the best schools and public services were the reserved for whites. Kabulonga for instance was a white only school in the pre indepdendence era. Kenneth Kaunda became a vegetarian initially in protest to blacks having to be served meat out of the back and white in the front.There was also the "Hut Tax" which was introduced to force blacks off the land so that they would be forced to migrate to the Copperbelt to provide cheap labour for the mines. Blacks who refused to pay the Hut Tax had their homes burned and were forced off their land.

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Manning: The struggle against colonial rule in 1912, as you put it, was more the embryonic beginnings of national identity rather than a struggle against some terrible invader. The BSA Company had, after all, just recently put down the slave trade and released villagers from stockaded villages unconnected by paths. The state of the few people living in what is now Zambia in those times was terrible indeed, not helped by the colonial invasions of the Mokololo under Sebituane and the Ngoni under Mpezeni; colonialism being as old as man itself, and certainly not something peculiarly European. Without the coming of European enlightenment to Zambia, who knows what state society would be in here. I think we British still thank the Romans for enlightening us and drawing us out of our primitive state. There certainly was a colour bar here, based more on class issues than race. The hut tax was introduced in order to persuade villagers, who had never before taken jobs, to work. Roads and railways needed to be built. All unfortunate of course, but only if you would like Zambians to have remained as pure subsistence villagers, without education and development. There were refusals to pay hut tax, and discipline was imposed, undoubtedly at times harsh; such is progress which the history of all nations exhibit. But the British Administration was one of the most enlghtened the world has seen. The Zambia law is British law, for which we all should be thankful.
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Suljani: Further, the mineral wealth that was obtained from the copper mines right up to indepndence went straight to the British Treasury. Please tell me when and where the British compensated the Zambian people for the mineral wealth they expropriated for the better part of 100 years from Zambia.
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Manning: This is an old canard put about by early politicians, particularly Kenneth. The British SA. Co. who introduced the wheel here, had a royal charter, and was not part of the Imperial Government. What mining activities were in place at the time of the building of the railway line at the start of the 20th Century? Kansanshi and the bare beginnings of others. That and other development was paid for by the Company until 1922. If you care to go into the records you will see that Britain made no money from North-Western Rhodesia, North-Eastern Rhodesia or Northern Rhodesia. I might just as well ask you where our compensation is for putting down the slave trade, building the railway, the telegraph line, putting in most of the infrastructure as exists at present in the country, let alone fighting two World Wars (with the help of a number of Northern Rhodesians of all colours), which if lost, would have not enabled you to enjoy the present freedoms now in existence.
_______________________________________

Suljani: This applies to many African countries where the colonial situation existed.

So I really do not understand why it should cause such offence to you when the indeginous people of Zambia (or put bluntly, the Black people) want a stake in their motherland. You go to England, to Germany, to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland... the indeginous people of those countries control something like 70-80% of their economy. Look at the outcry all over Europe over a few thousand immigrants coming in from Africa and Asia to take lowly paying jobs. What would happen if African and Asian immigrants dominated 80 - 90% of the economy in the UK, Germany or France when just having living in the same neighbourhood causes public outcry.
________________________________________
Manning: I take offence because the history of the BEE in South Africa is that it has not benefitted the poor at all, merely the few having close ties with the ruling hierarchy; and the NEPAD peer review process, carried out by indigenous leaders of Africa, stated this clearly in their peer review report of South Africa. We all want the people of Zambia to have a stake in the country, but you do that by ushering in investment, not as is the case for medium to small investors, discouraging it. Western countries rely on immgration for growth. However, immigration purely by people without technical know-how creates more problems than solutions. But when immigrants such as the Ugandan Asians, expelled by Amin - for just such reasons as you seem to favour, came to Britain, the beneficial effect on the economy was considerable.
________________________________________
Suljani: Please Mr Manning, we are a new and enlightened generation of Zambians and Africans. We have lived and been educated in the West. We appreciate that in a global village their has to be bilateral and multilateral cooperation in business but that cooperation must involve major participation of the local people.
We would be foolish to think otherwise. China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong have all developed by ensuring major participation of their local people in the economy (in other words CITIZENS ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT). Why then do you condem it when South Africa does and Zambia rather late emulates this.
_______________________________________

Manning: I can only repeat, the NEPAD Peer Review for South Africa condemmed the BEE Act, crime and corruption as posing the greatest threat to that country. Legislating for greater participation of local people in the economy, particularly if racially based, is both counter productive and offensive. Rather the development of smart partnership, as recentlty called for by the President, and as I have been advocating for years, is the way forward. Many Zambians already have businesses which cannot prosper because of the lack of technical knowledge and capital. A Government policy which does not encourage investment will result in just such a situation as pertains here now. After all you can go to my country, be resident, and obtain citizenship after five years. Let a foreigner try that here. And ask your M.P. to pose the following question in the National Assembly: "How many of those holding investment certificates, and protected under the Investment Development Agency Act of 1996 - and the now repealed Investment Act, have had their self-employed permits denied by the Ministry of Home Affairs; and how many without investment certificates but running successful businesses, have been so denied". Let me know what you discover. However, it will merely show that Zambians do follow the policy of Zambia for the Zambians; all very well were you to eschew the 40% or so we have been pumping into your budget since your Independence. You can't have it both ways, as the Bishop said to the actress.
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COMMENT EX-AFRICA: Well said. Mr Suljani appears to suffer from acute myopia as well as
ignorance! Maybe he should take a closer look at what the "Yellow"
colonialists are up to in the mining, construction and retailing industries
and the impact this has on Zambians and employment today. I saw a truck
full of frozen Chinese in Kabulonga heading to a building site the other
day in early am and not a single black man in their midst. I wondered what
had happened to CEE!

NOTES OF A FOREIGN INVESTOR IN ZAMBIA ...

25 Sepember, 06.

‘Bad laws are the worst sort of tyranny’
(Edmund Burke)

The recent appointment by the President of Zambia of the members of a Commission which is answerable only to himself and whose mandate is to promote by ‘whatever actions are necessary’ the economic empowerment of ‘targeted citizens’ i.e. black and indigenous Zambians, is both ominous and unsettling, particularly for us investors who can now look forward to some intensive predator-prey interactions as the Citizens Economic Empowerment Act No 9 of 2006 starts to have its merry way with us.

The CEE Act makes no bones about the powers given to the President (appointing the members, directing it what to do) and to the Commission: (giving instructions or directions to any State institution or a company, taking ‘whatever actions necessary to ensure broad based economic empowerment of targeted citizens, citizen empowered companies, citizen influenced companies and citizen owned companies.’), making it abundantly clear just how an investor is viewed by the Government of Zambia on 24 September 2006.

As a foreign investor in rural development who is also a member of Business Action for Africa, what might be my objections to such legislation? Well, for a start, as a paid up member of the Western Liberal Democratic Club – presumably the same one the Government belongs to, this legislation closely resembles Lenin’s decree for the establishment of the People’s Commissariat of State Control in 1919, with Stalin as its first Commissar, legislation imported from the only country in Africa still with a communist party, South Africa. The go-between for the transfer of this racially based legislation is J.J. Sikazwe, a member of the Zambia International Advisory Council, senior policy advisor to BP, Chairman of the Tourism Council of Zambia (TCZ), and coincidently, Chairman of the first ‘empowerment’ company in Zambia, Legacy Holdings Zambia, recently given a 75 year tourism lease by the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) to build two large hotels, an 18 hole golf course and 400 or so chalets in the tiny Mosi oa Tunya National Park at the Victoria Falls – a World Heritage Site. And despite the Vice-President laying a foundation stone, accompanied by an extraordinary and virulent attack on foreign tourism investors, no environmental impact assessment has yet been accepted by the authorities.

And why the need for such legislation? After all, Apartheid passed Zambia by, and unlike Zimbabwe, we were never a Crown Colony where large areas of land were alienated to European settlers. In fact this alluring patch of Africa with its friendly people was administered first by a company having a Royal Charter - whose first act was to put down the slave trade and build a railway, followed by Imperial Government rule for a mere 40 years from 1924 – 1964, a time of Lord Lugard inspired, Indirect Rule, with the administration conducted through the chiefs and with customary land fiercely protected from European settlement, a blimpish, wonderfully-dedicated-to-the-cause-of-the-black-man, at times blundering administration that got tired of trying to bring on the natives and simply went home to tea and crumpets. The CEE Act appears therefore set to rectify a mythical colonial wrong, to wrest some of the control and ownership of businesses from those who came to Zambia more recently and who are not black Africans. But the CEE Act will not encourage investors to enter into partnerships with the natives, as is happening in Mauritius and Ireland and China. It will simply close the borders and allow the natives due license to harvest the products of existing producers. Humbug, of course.

And of course, the first sector to come under the Commission’s scrutiny will be the tourism industry, white run and white owned, many being Zambian but not ‘targeted citizens’ – and agriculture apart, the only other source of income for the 94% of Zambia under customary tenure. And of course tourism is the main source of income for the statutory body responsible for wildlife and protected areas, now transposed into a modern cash-cow called the Zambia Wildlife Authority which has already started its empowerment role by taking away the hunting safari concessions of three companies on dodgy legal grounds, and, although temporarily delayed by a legal writ, about to grab the concessions of a further six areas – some 25% of the industry; and hunting is the sole support of Community Resource Boards and the wildlife in a third of the country.

The grand irony and most indigestible bit of all – particularly for those of us whose governments have written off the debt and who continue to lend more, is that the CEE Act was introduced by Zambia when she had just become a fully paid-up member of the international community. After all, she was a solid supporter and contributer to the Commission for Africa, (now dynamically expressed through its organization, Business Action for Africa) - formed to assist Africa raise the living standards of its people, which persuaded the G8 Group of Nations at the Gleneagles Summit to write off much of Africa’s debt in return for undertakings by African countries to improve standards of governance. As a result, once Zambia achieved the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) completion point in April 2005, most of the Paris Club creditors cancelled Zambia’s public debt, and the African Development Bank, the IMF and the World Bank - under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative, are doing the same. If to this is added the agreed commitment to the mission of NEPAD, the UN Millenium Development Goals and the African Peer Review Mechanism, Zambia is bent on self-improvement – with the help of the world

Instead, Zambia, which at Independence had the same per capita income as the Asian Tiger nations (now Hong Kong is 75 times richer, South Korea 25 times richer),
is, by all credible economic performance measures, upholding a tradition of lamentable economic governance by re-introducing an assets indigenization programme which flies in the face of all its commitments to good governance, partnerships and all other laudable development goals. Do not be fooled by the official statistics trotted out by Government, the IMF and its donor partners: the rampant corruption, the fuel shortages, the deplorable mismanagement of the exchange rate mechanism which saw the dollar lose 30% of its value, the inflation rate and the 2006 budget, which before a near riot to change it saw small scale farmers having to pay VAT on their crop inputs – but without the facility to reclaim it, is the reality. In agriculture we have lost many thousands of jobs.

Much of Zambia is under siege: the now rampant abuse of the savanna by fire – a major contributer by Africa to global dimming and the increasing brittleness of the environment; the depletion of wildlife due to the bushmeat trade and poorly regulated hunting; the second highest deforestation rate in Africa due to the charcoal industry and the illegal timber trade; the overfishing and pollution of our rivers and lakes; all of this contributing to a downward spiral of land capability impairing the prospects for the rural poor’s upliftment out of a witchbound and increasingly denuded environment – is reiterated in the preamble to Zambia’s draft National Policy on Environment of 2005. And most of the 19 National Parks, 35 GMAs and numerous National Forests are under only rudimentary protection and management; some Parks and Forests are already settled by people, some Parks being leased to infrastructural developers - or tourism concessions expanded without due process before the necessary environmental assessment work is completed (Mosi-oa-Tunya NP); a few National Forests (Mvuvye West NF) sold off illegally by the Ministry of Lands on statutory leases; and customary land - which includes the GMAs where some tourism is conducted, continue as a mere open access area where no ownership of natural resources is vested in the people and where the classic tragedy of the commons is being re-enacted.

Notes from the last Zambian general election...

CHANGE TO STOP THE CHANGE …

Today, the 28 September 2006, the people of Zambia are voting, probably – due to the mobile phone revolution and the depth of their discontent, in unprecedented numbers. They will be voting for the present incumbent, President Levy Mwanawasa, or the man of the people, Michael Sata.

There has been a general deterioration in this bit of the old British Africa, independent politically since 1964, where foreign donor aid perpetuates economic dependency, where the comfortable mutualistic parasitic relationship between Government and Donors show no signs whatever of raising Africa up out of its parlous state, what can be done? What is being done?

What has begun is a steadily growing resistance movement against centralized governance, its uncritical donor partners and well-heeled investors, who are carving up, willy-nilly, the natural resource cake. The catalyst for this resistance is the tourism lease given to an empowerment company in the Victoria Falls World Heritage Site - specifically in the Mosi oa Tunya National Park, for the building of two five-star hotels, an 18 hole golf course and 400 or so riverside chalets. Coming under the spotlight is the Zambia Wildlife Authority, the National Movement Against Corruption, Legacy Holdings and its empowerment Chairman, the World Bank, a Chief and a community trust, some silent multi-national conservation NGOs, UNESCO, the Zambia National Heritage and Conservation Commission, and a group of resolute citizen and non-citizens never so united in the defense of something which belongs to the world.

So, do we look forward to a long five years of litigation against Government, of a war against the donors and investors who cut their own deals without recourse to the people, of an indigenization programme modeled on that of South Africa. On the other hand, will we see and support change to effect a change: leadership and duty, discipline, devolution and decentralization, investment and job creation, health and education, a social safety net for the poor, and partnerships with the private sector conducted in an open and transparent manner. That would be a start to getting Zambia back into business, so that no more will we hear, “Zambia has great potential!”

ZAMBIA ERECTIONS

In but 12 hours or so, Joyce and Eunice, two widows with a host of children to look after - not all their own, will shut the door of their huts and walk through the dark to the polling station at the school in Chainda, Lusaka, to cast their votes. For the first time ever, this vote, this referendum for a light out of the dark, is being taken seriously. For years these two salts of the earth have had to suffer the verbal froth of politicians, their lot growing more desperate, the mouths at their pots added like beads to a string as HIV/Aids and a distant Government consign them to deeper poverty. Not that this is Somalia, where the normally effulgent rains found in Zambia is unknown, where clan brigands hold sway with the gun, where the glow of western liberal democracy is but a distant memory. But, hell, they do want change.

They want the Chinese cadre ‘erection’ supporters of the ruling party out, not the Chinese and other investors in infrastructure, mining and agriculture, but the ‘Chinee’ flogging eggs in the compounds and shanty towns, let in through some invisible process not available to the normal investor who has to suffer – and fork out, for the endless circuits of the Immigration Department at the execrable Kent House - a re-make of Vichy France Casablanca, for the Zambia Investment Centre blandishments, for the lawyers requiring a President’s ransom, for the host Ministry for what-ever, for the Banks with their forms endless, for the grasping government departments and their harvesting civil-servants, and for the bloody speed cops sequestered in the shade but a mile from the airport, pens poised, collecting their salary…

Joyce and Eunice: no English, no skills, just the good people of an old culture not yet embracing the terrible allure of the industrial age, witch bound… wanting a Government that will remove the necessity for school uniforms, that will pay the teachers and buy the books, and provide the free medicines in the clinics – not the ‘free of medicines’ clinic, that will provide a bloody house with water and a clean bog. For God’s sake!

Zambia's investment crisis...

Well, these meetings one attends in the Zambian national interest, are rather like an interview with the Headmaster who having summoned one to his study, goes on a bit and allows one to speak, once, then gets the wrong idea anyway. Not that the report of Frydah's was too bad. But what I said was that the meeting tended, as they often do, to lose its focus on the true causes of the disease which continues to ail the Zambian corpus, concentrting rather on the symptoms: the headachy bits of bureaucracy, of 'the benefits to us Zambians in business bit', finally entering into a bit of a moan about everyone concentrating on foreign investors, rather than domestic. I like to quickly diagnose the disease and the exact treatment. In Zambia's case, the facts speak plainly. At Independence all of forty-two years ago, with a population of 3 million we had 450,000 people in formal empoyment; now with a population of 11 million we have, more-or-less, the same number. Ergo, the Zambian body is in perpetual decline. What to do? Well, everyone knows we need jobs, in the urban as well as in the 94% of Zambia under a semblance of customary control. But where are these jobs to come from? From Zambia, which lost its critical mass of entrepeneurial non-blacks in 1975 after some Kenneth Kaunda invocations of socialist madness? I don't think so. To achieve a growth rate of 10%, we will need to open the doors to immigrants, small and large. Perhaps we could lure back those splendid 18, 000 Hindu businessmen and their families who created a web of trading stores in country districts, killed off by Kenneth in 1966 when he decreed that Indians should no longer be in the retail trade. Or perhaps some of the hundreds of skilled civil servant, the remnants of the 5,000 graduates in service in 1962, who were told in 1975 by Kenneth that if they left Government service they would not be allowed to go into private enterprise.

What I actually ended up saying was that Zambia sat impaled permanently on the horns of a dilemma: it wants money, investment, but it is ambivalent about having the people who can deliver it. And now the Committee on Economic Affairs and Labour have usked for comments on the adequacy of Zambia's Legal and Policy Framework on Investment. Sure, the Zambia Development Agency Act No 11. of 2006 needs a bit of tweaking and the development of suitable regulations that have had the helping hand of the public in their writing, but will the correct diagnosis ever be given on the economy in this swirling soup of political correctness and xenophobic nationalism.

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Cho said...
Interesting blog!!

I sure will be checking out in the future.

In general I think our performance on the Milken Index continues to show that Zambia is hard place to start up a businessand it has bizarrely got progressively worse.

Until those conditions improve, we will continue to struggle

The Citizens' Economic Empowerment Act

THE CEE ACT

1. Is an Act to establish the Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission and to define its functions and powers; to establish the Citizens Economic Empowerment Fund; and to promote the economic empowerment of citizens, in particular, targeted citizens – defined as someone who is or has been marginalised or disadvantaged and whose access to economic resources and development capacity has been constrained due to various factors including race, sex, educational background, status and disability;

2. In the performance of the Commission's functions under this Act, the Commission shall effectively liaise and consult appropriate State institutions and shall have the power to give such instructions or directions to any State institution or a company

3. The President may give to the Commission such general or specific directions with respect to the discharge of its functions as the President considers necessary and the Commission shall give effect to such directions.

4. The commissioners shall be appointed by the President.

5. The Commission shall be empowered to take whatever actions necessary to ensure broad based economic empowerment of targeted citizens, citizen empowered companies, citizen influenced companies, citizen influenced companies and citizen owned companies.

INTRODUCTION

The Zambian Citizens Economic Empowerment Act of 2006 (CEE) is legislation which will centralize further power in the Presidency, give wide powers to a Commission reporting directly to him, enrich – in the short term, the political elite, freeze foreign investment, ensure continued impoverishment and the unsustainable use of natural resources, and greatly exacerbate the already unacceptable erosion of the national life by corruption and theft in the name of black indigenous empowerment.

This is exactly what has happened in South Africa through the imposition of the South African legal instrument: Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act No. 53 of 2003, which is being implemented by the Black Economic Empowerment Advisory Council directly under the control of the South African President.

Prior to the promulgation of the CEE Act, the civil service were instructed to start implementing it, resulting in a racial bias on such issues as lodge leases and the arrogant manner in which Legacy Holdings Zambia advanced on its plans for Mosi oa Tunya National Park. This does not auger well for the future.


PRESENT INTERNATIONAL CONTEXT

The CEE Act is being introduced to Zambia at a time when the Commission for Africa was formed to assist Africa raise the living standards of its people. After extensive consultations and lobbying it persuaded the G8 group of nations at the Gleneagles Summit to write off much of Africa’s debt in return for undertakings by African countries to improve standards of governance. As a result, once Zambia achieved the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) Completion Point in April 2005, most of the Paris Club creditors cancelled Zambia’s public debt, and the African Development Bank, the IMF and the World Bank - under the Multilateral Debt Relief Initiative borne out of the 2005 Group of 8 Gleneagles proposal, are now busy doing the same. If to this is added the agreed commitment to the mission of NEPAD, the UN Millenium Development Goals and the African Peer Review Mechanism, Africa is supposedly bent on self improvement – with the help of the world.

Zambia played a full role in the consultations with the Commission, and through its Zambia International Business Advisory Council (ZIBAC) – a member of which sits on both the Business Council of Zambia and ZIBAC (and is also Chairman of the CEE Commission – as well as Chairman of the Tourism Council of Zambia - and what may be described as the first Indigenous Zambian business group), therefore appeared set to become a role model for Africa.

ZAMBIAN CONTEXT

Zambia has evolved in a hundred years from a land of isolated tribes, through rudimentary administration by a public company, to colonial protectorate status - where rule was indirectly managed through the chiefs, to political independence. Unlike Zimbabwe, it was not a Crown Colony where large areas of land were alienated to European settlers; and unlike South Africa it did not suffer Apartheid legislation and the repression of its black population.

The CEE Act appears therefore to to rectify a mythical colonial wrong, to remove some of the control and ownership of businesses from those who came here more recently and who are not black Africans – in the case of some of the first European settlers, fifty years after the arrival of the Ngoni. It does not encourage people to come here and to enter into partnerships with citizens as Mauritius and Ireland and China is doing. And it is likely to give expression to the simmering national xenophobia, which will metaphorically close the borders and harvest what has been produced by foreign and local non-black investors alike.

And Zambia is, by all credible economic performance measures, is upholding a tradition of poor economic governance and the continued plundering of the national purse. At Independence, Zambia’s per capita income was the same as the Asian Tiger nations; now Hong Kong is 75 times richer, South Korea 25 times richer; and over the last twenty years – as reported by Transparency International Zambia, only 16% of national expenditure went on agriculture, health, education and local government – the very areas supposed to serve the poor.

The translation of shocks brought about by economic mismanagement – particularly when allied with volatile copper and oil markets, can elicit reactions from political leadership which further impoverish their countries. In 1975, following on from a fall in copper prices and a rise in oil prices, President Kaunda issued the infamous Watershed speech, an edict which overnight restructured the economy and lost Zambia a critical mass of private enterprise and government expertise, consigning its poor to a permanently impoverished state, accompanied by the rape of much of its natural resources. The CEE Act of President Mwanawasa will now negate a wave of new investment, of innovative new partnerships with tribal communities that do not alienate the land; and will diminish the growth of democracy.

The CEE has already negated the work of such bodies as the Natural Resources Consultative Forum (NRCF), a neutral platform for stakeholder participation in the management of natural resources - particularly policy formulation, established by the Ministry of Tourism, Environment and Natural Resources (MTENR). Now civil servants of that Ministry are unwilling to participate in its deliberations, knowing that they and the private business sector will be subject to the control and direction of the proposed Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission, itself directly under the control of the President.

SOUTH AFRICAN TEMPLATE

The immediate impression of this Act, is that it closely resembles Lenin’s decree for the establishment of the People’s Commissariat of State Control in 1919, with Stalin as its first Commissar. It is not surprising, therefore, that the only country in Africa still with a communist party, South Africa, has supplied the model for the CEE Act. The legislative template is the South African legal instrument: Broad-based Black Economic Empowerment Act No. 53 of 2003, which is being implemented by the Black Economic Empowerment Advisory Council directly under the control of the South African President. The impact of this Act, applied to a rich country with a thriving business sector and a generally ably managed economy has been to enrich a small coterie of the black elite, provide considerable advancement opportunities for the emerging black middle class, ensure the unemployment of most of the black poor, and cause young and well-educated whites, Indians and Coloureds to emigrate.

But Broad Based Black Empowerment Act (BBBE), is now considered by the Peer Review Mechanism Report on South Africa to pose a serious obstacle to that country’s development –something the South African Government is trying to downplay. Why would Zambia escape such a judgement when the APRM gets round to its report on us?

THE WAY FORWARD

For the CEE Act to have any credibility, it must be taken out of the hands of the State President, have its Commissioner removed and replaced by someone not involved in business, and must arm the Private Sector Development Forum in the fast-tracking of Greenfield projects through Trust structures - as inculcated in the Zambia Development Agency Act No. 11 of 2006, and already agreed to by the House of Chiefs and submitted to the 5th National Development Plan. It is time the Zambian poor receive the attention and support they deserve. The CEE Act could here become an Act serving their deliverance from deep poverty.
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Suljani....responds to this post. Thank you, Suljani. Have just come on your comment, but as it is G & T hour, will respond later at the onset of the cold sober light of dawn.
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Mr Manning, I just want to respond to your comments and correct some of your history about Zambia.

I am the great grandson of Donald Siwale who was amongst the group of Zambians that began the first organised struggle against colonial rule in 1912. They formed what was called the Mwenzo Welfare Association with David Kaunda (father to Kenneth Kaunda), Peter Sinkala and others. I was fortunate enough to talk to my great grandfather before he died in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was a young boy but I remember he used to talk about what he called "Colour Bar" that was practiced by the Colonial Administration before independence. In other words, there were separate inferior schools and other public services for blacks, indians and coloureds whereas the best schools and public services were the reserved for whites. Kabulonga for instance was a white only school in the pre indepdendence era. Kenneth Kaunda became a vegetarian initially in protest to blacks having to be served meat out of the back and white in the front.

There was also the "Hut Tax" which was introduced to force blacks off the land so that they would be forced to migrate to the Copperbelt to provide cheap labour for the mines. Blacks who refused to pay the Hut Tax had their homes burned and were forced off their land.

Further, the mineral wealth that was obtained from the copper mines right up to indepdence went straight to the British Treasury. Please tell me when and where the British compensated the Zambian people for the mineral wealth they expropriated for the better part of 100 years from Zambia.

This applies to many African countries where the colonial situation existed.

So I really do not understand why it should cause such offence to you when the indeginous people of Zambia (or put bluntly, the Black people) want a stake in their motherland. You go to England, to Germany, to Sweden, to Norway, to Finland... the indeginous people of those countries control something like 70-80% of their economy. Look at the outcry all over Europe over a few thousand immigrants coming in from Africa and Asia to take lowly paying jobs. What would happen if African and Asian immigrants dominated 80 - 90% of the economy in the UK, Germany or France when just having living in the same neighbourhood causes public outcry.

Please Mr Manning, we are a new and enlightened generation of Zambians and Africans. We have lived and been educated in the West. We appreciate that in a global village their has to be bilateral and multilateral cooperation in business but that cooperation must involve major participation of the local people.
We would be foolish to think otherwise. China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Singapore and Hong Kong have all developed by ensuring major participation of their local people in the economy (in other words CITIZENS ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT). Why then do you condem it when South Africa does and Zambia rather late emulates this.
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AND WHAT THEY SAY IN MARCH 2008!!!

Musamba urges govt to formulate equal resource distribution policies
by Kabanda Chulu
Thursday March 06, 2008

FORMER Jubilee Zambia national coordinator Charity Musamba has observed that Citizen Economic Empowerment (CEE) programmes will not achieve intended objectives if there are no strategies of identifying people to be empowered.

And University of Zambia Development Studies’ lecturer Dr Francis Chigunta has said current economic growth obtaining in the country is not tangible and would not help to attain the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

Commenting on the developmental activities taking place around the country, Musamba urged the government to develop a resources distribution strategy that could benefit all people.

“When you critically look at the Citizen Economic Empowerment (CEE) programmes, you will find that it has nothing for ordinary people and it will not achieve intended objectives because it lacks strategies that will identify people to be empowered and mainly the elite people will access the funds and invest in ventures such as shares and blue chip markets thereby not creating massive employment,” Musamba said.

“Hence, Zambia will continue lagging behind because the government had not developed policies that must ensure equitable distribution of resources.”

Musamba, who is currently pursuing her PhD studies in Germany, commended the government for introducing windfall taxes for the mining sector.

“We are just excited about the investors coming into the country but they are not doing anything for the people and since we do not have good policies as a country, the mining sector will just leave us with negative social and environmental impacts if the prices decline but I am happy that the government has introduced these taxes so that benefits from these resources are distributed fairly to all people,” said Musamba.

And Dr Chigunta said there was mass poverty in the country and the government was not putting in place mitigation measures.

“It is true that various sectors of the economy are showing signs of growth but this is not tangible and since we are struggling to attain six per cent of GDP, these current growth rates will not help us attain the MDGs, especially that of reducing poverty by half by 2015,” Dr Chigunta said.

“And also there is need for the government to develop sustainable measures that will help translate economic growth into ways of reducing the mass poverty currently prevailing in the country.”

Zambia's investment crisis...

Well, these meetings one attends in the Zambian national interest, are rather like an interview with the Headmaster who having summoned one to his study, goes on a bit and allows one to speak, once, then gets the wrong idea anyway. Not that the report of Frydah's was too bad. But what I said was that the meeting tended, as they often do, to lose its focus on the true causes of the disease which continues to ail the Zambian corpus, concentrting rather on the symptoms: the headachy bits of bureaucracy, of 'the benefits to us Zambians in business bit', finally entering into a bit of a moan about everyone concentrating on foreign investors, rather than domestic. I like to quickly diagnose the disease and the exact treatment. In Zambia's case, the facts speak plainly. At Independence all of forty-two years ago, with a population of 3 million we had 450,000 people in formal empoyment; now with a population of 11 million we have, more-or-less, the same number. Ergo, the Zambian body is in perpetual decline. What to do? Well, everyone knows we need jobs, in the urban as well as in the 94% of Zambia under a semblance of customary control. But where are these jobs to come from? From Zambia, which lost its critical mass of entrepeneurial non-blacks in 1975 after some Kenneth Kaunda invocations of socialist madness? I don't think so. To achieve a growth rate of 10%, we will need to open the doors to immigrants, small and large. Perhaps we could lure back those splendid 18, 000 Hindu businessmen and their families who created a web of trading stores in country districts, killed off by Kenneth in 1966 when he decreed that Indians should no longer be in the retail trade. Or perhaps some of the hundreds of skilled civil servant, the remnants of the 5,000 graduates in service in 1962, who were told in 1975 by Kenneth that if they left Government service they would not be allowed to go into private enterprise.

What I actually ended up saying was that Zambia sat impaled permanently on the horns of a dilemma: it wants money, investment, but it is ambivalent about having the people who can deliver it. And now the Committee on Economic Affairs and Labour have usked for comments on the adequacy of Zambia's Legal and Policy Framework on Investment. Sure, the Zambia Development Agency Act No 11. of 2006 needs a bit of tweaking and the development of suitable regulations that have had the helping hand of the public in their writing, but will the correct diagnosis ever be given on the economy in this swirling soup of political correctness and xenophobic nationalism.
I.P.A. Manning

Safari hunting quota corruption...

1. The Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) state that the West Petauke Game Management Area No.17 (610,000 ha) includes the Luangwa River, although for the past four years or so hippo and crocodile have been issued on quota by ZAWA to M’nyamadzi Game Ranch (Luangwa east bank) and allowed to be shot there by M’nyamadzi owners and hunters – although Mbizi game ranch to the south, do not take crocodile or hippo from the river. The Surveyor-General in the Ministry of Lands states that private land may not encroach closer than 60 m from the Luangwa, therefore how is it possible for M’nyamadzi to hunt outside its borders? No EIA by the Environmental Council of Zambia (ECZ) of the present fence construction has been carried out, nor any consultations with the local community, or the Mbeza concessionaire, or the Forestry Department as required by the Fencing Ordinance of the Agricultural Lands Act. The quotas issued are not sustainable for the area, offtakes obviously denuding the West Mvuvye National Forest to the north, the Nyimba Open area to the south and the West Petauke Hunting Concession to the west – Nyimba open area in Luembe having been set aside for use for a community game ranch under a proposed usufruct lease managed by the Luembe Conservancy Trust, and negotiated in 2004. Scrutiny of the two quota sets is evidence of corruption within ZAWA.
2. The 10, 500 ha ranch in question (property No. f/10005; certificate of title No. L9879), on a 25 year provisionary lease (only 14 year provisionary leases are allowed under the Lands Act of 1995), registered 9 March 2001, though obtained in 1998, is partially unfenced and adjoins the West Mvuvye National Forest No. 54 and customary land in the Luembe Chiefdom. For game ranchers to have ownership rights to wildlife they are required to fence and purchase the animals inside. This has not been done.
3. Customary landowners, through their Luembe Community Resource Board, applied for safari hunting quota in their open area (for onward sale to hunting outfitters), as well as for selected wildlife harvesting rights, and were refused by ZAWA. The latter is a denial of community rights, as contained in the Wildlife Act of 1998.
4. On the purchase of Mbeza Safaris by the founders of the Luembe Conservancy Trust at the end of 2004, hunting quotas for West Petauke were voluntarily lowered by the owners and the CRB, in the process invoking the precautionary principle as contained in the Biodiversity Convention. This was agreed to by ZAWA, who then later hiked up the quotas to previous levels in order to conform with the Hunting Concession Agreement, and then fined Mbeza $43,000 for ‘underachievement’ in the use of the qota in 2006, refusing to entertain mediation in the matter.
5. The present quotas issued to Mbeza are in some cases substantially higher than agreed to in meetings, or lower than requested.

The Zambian Department of Immigration mantra, 'Your business is not viable'...

The batwings to Kent House, Emmigration Lodge, now half ruin, half container shed, have moved their batwings to the side entrance where endless anxious souls wanting to live and work here, or just visit here, enter, milling about like sheep, trying - usually in Euriah Heep mould, or just striding up to a desk if not, oblivious of that ancient custom, the queue. No one helps with the traffice of course, nor seems to realise that this truly is bedlam, and the worst advert for this country possible - once one of the richest and best run in Africa. My wife, she of kindly christian firmness, waits patiently day following day for promised permits, or whatever; sitting in this office and that, until finally the promised letter she awaits informing my son that his self-employment permit has been refused, as 'our business is not viable', is really a letter for me from the Minister of Home Affairs informing me that my appeal to stay on in Zambia as a bona fide investor, supposedly protected by the Investment Act, let alone that old stand-by, 'good faith', has been denied, and that no further correspondence on the matter will be entertained. Game, set and match.

And so to the High Court, where, thank goodness, Order 53 rule 3 of the rules of the Supreme Court of England are enforced, and I have my stay of execution and judicial review in a month's time. But what of the many similar such ' your business is not viable' claps of gloom that fall about other investors' ears? I met the partner of an English chap who has invested $2 million in the country and they won't even give him a self-employed permit. And the word at the Zambia Investment Centre is that the emails pour in from my 'your business is not viable' fellow sufferers, now gone for ever from Zambia, their investment in tatters, or sold off for a pittance, or just left in the bush for someone else to sort out the mess, or, ominously, handed out to someone else 'administratively'. But, hang on, the Zambia Development Agency (which is supposed to have absorbed the Zambia Investment Centre by now) has just announced that it has issued another 53 investment permits. Do they give them out with a Kent House health warning?

There are of course Zambian laws for the protection of investors - even international agreements and conventions. And of course there are our mother countries, who pour the money in here daily. Will they help? Not much is my experience? But I will try; at least to warn some fellow Irishman about thinking it is all a cool Guinness here. I might even give Business Action for Africa a ring, the organization which negotiated with the G8 for Zambia's debt write-off. Our company here, Mbeza Safaris, is a corporate member, faithfully following the manifesto which is to help Africa in every way possible, including fighting corruption.

Well, we are over a million and a half dollars over our head already in our effort to partner rural communities in developing businesses and to look after the land, the widlife, with part of our operation a tourism business which now aestivates, for one can hardly bring in tourists now. And other plans to invest more money, to bring in other investors at the request of a number of Zambians who have Tourism Concession Agreements (TCAs) but no capital, will just have to wait, perhaps for ever.

It's sad, really. I've been here on and off since Northern Rhodesia days, served Government for three tours, came back to help the forgotten in the sticks - which includes the elephant now so mercilessly being extirpated by rotten officials and crime syndicates. But does anyone care? Of course not. Just bring in foreign investors under any old pretext, then when they have set something up, just give them the old heave ho; they won't complain, carrying all that guilt of the white man's burden as they do.

Manning given reprieve from Ministerial boot...

Corruption increases in Zambia...

The Anti-corruption Commission (ACC) says reports of corruption are on the increase. Acting director for Prevention, Festus Chipungu says the commission is now receiving more serious reports of corruption than was the case in the past years. Mr. Chipungu reiterated that the commission is determined to eradicate the vice. Meanwhile, Mr. Chipungu said the ACC has not yet started receiving corruption reports from integrity committees that were recently established in various institutions. He was optimistic that the establishment of such committees will contribute greatly to efforts aimed at fighting corruption.
ZNBC

Investing in Zambian Tourism...

Livingstone
Sven, a Danish citizen whose knowledge of the Zambezi below the Victoria Falls is legendary, is the person appointed by the Livingstone water rats industry to be its safety officer, marshalling the many rafts and canoes down what they tell me is the best bit of white water in the world. But he too has received one of those notices from the Immigration Department informing him that his self-employed permit has not been renewed because
‘his business is not viable’.

So Sven, who had made Livingstone his home, will be off, perhaps to Uganda where so many experienced Livingstone river rats have gone because of similar Immigration Department problems. In Uganda, apparently, they welcome the Livingstone fundis with open arms, issuing them immediately with five year, renewable work permits. And so the Livingstone industry declines, not helped by the fact that Zambia is very expensive, that they have just had ten days in Livingstone without water and are assailed by frequent attacks of power cut blight, the killing of the second last white rhino - its mate hiding away with a shattered leg and no means to perambulate in search of grazing here in the dry season, and the town being steadily destroyed by endless growling streams of mega trucks coming through the border. Reports from the river rats is that business is in decline and that their struggle with Immigration, with rapacious revenue collectors, with labour officers, makes them think of other more hospitable climes.

Mfuwe, Luangwa
A week ago a group of 27 residents went down to Mfuwe to visit the South Luangwa Park. They were advised to pay $30.00 each per day to enter the National Park. As one of the group had already been charged this fee some months back, he had armed himself with a copy of the page from SI 73 of 2004 (Statutory Instrument) which clearly states that for residents, 174 fee units at 180.0 per unit is payable. For three days they tried to enter the park and were refused entry at the legal fee because no one at ZAWA could confirm what the correct charges were. It appears that they were being charged according to the new SI not yet signed into law. They left Mfuwe without having entered the park.

It seems clear that, in addition to the Tourism and Hospitality bill before the National Assembly, which in the form I had studied and commented on over a year ago would have ensured that villagers could not join the tourism industry easily, a raft of long overdue SI’s are about to appear on the Government Gazette editor’s desk. These are regulations on prescribed fees, Game Management Areas, hunting, National Parks and game ranching, which have not been signed off by their respective stakeholders. One of these stakeholders writes: “The alarming part of this is that we have been asking for a copy of this draft for over 10 months. Many letters have been written to ZAWA and phone calls made yet it has been impossible to get anything. It is clear that there are things in the SI that ZAWA does not want to be known until it is too late. I have established that the fees for "residents" to enter National Parks are slated to go up substantially and it also looks like the reason the resident hunting quota for wetlands has not been sold is because these fees have gone up substantially also. What else is in it; who knows.”

The Kafue National Park
The bush telegraph delivered some further disquieting news: there is to be a large game capture exercise in the north, and a translocation to Liuwa Plain National Park. I hope that the Environmental Council of Zambia will insist on an EIA. We all remember the previous translocation, the effects of which are felt in the Kafue today. Has this Park not suffered enough?

Zambia to remove crew of S.S.Mbeza Safaris...

The Minister of Home Affairs, Ronnie Shikapwasha, has refused the appeal of the Mbeza Safaris MD, Ian Manning against the Immigration Department refusal to issue him with a renewal of his self-employed permit, as required under Section 30 (1) of the Investment Act, Cap 385. At the time all directors of Mbeza Safaris Limited were by law entitled to a self-employment permit or resident permit. The section provides as follows:

“Notwithstanding the provisions of the Immigration and Deportation Act, an investor who invests a minimum of two hundred and fifty thousand United States Dollars or the equivalent in convertiblecurrency and who employs a minimum of ten persons shall be entitled to a self-employment permit or resident permit”

And today, Brendan Manning, received his letter turning down his renewal application; while Cathlin Manning, although a person and shareholder in her own right, is included within one Immigration file with her husband, and must therefore suffer the same fate as him.

Therefore today, Ian Manning, Brendan and Cathlin Manning have instructed their attorneys, W.M Kabimba & Associates to seek a stay and judicial review against the Minister of Home Affairs, the Attorney General and the Chief Immigration Officer.

Of letters of complain written to the Zambia Development Authority in the persons of its acting Director General and its Legal Counsel, not a word has been heard.

The luncheon affair...

When I received the letter (included in The Post article) from the President of Zambia's Principal Private Secretary, I fell about a bit, pinching myself to ensure I was awake. But my friend, Rolf Shenton, who indeed hosted a number of braais at his house, attended by all sorts of people- one particular lunch attended by the prominant politician Guy Scott, a lady from the World Bank, two members of the Muslim community active in tourism, Yussuf Patel and Goolam Patel, myself, and others, to discuss tourism development and so on, but nothing to do with politics, counselled caution and sound legal advice. The President happened to be out of the country at the time so it was clearly a time when power had gone to the heads of his minnions. So I wrote to this chap, Chipoya, stating what a good fellow I was and that I had not given much thought to overthowing the ruling party or destroying the maize stocks of Zambia.


Gamefields Ltd
Luembe Conservancy Trust
Mbeza Safaris Limited
Postnet Box 245, P/Bag E10, Lusaka, Zambia.
Telephone: (260) 1 28 22 4/Mobile: 260 97 618246
gamefields@zamnet.zm

A.N. Chipoya
Principal Private Secretary
State House
Lusaka.

20 April 06.

Dear Sir,
I am in receipt of your letter of 3 April 2006 – one also addressing Messrs, O. Irwin, I. Asherwood and R. Michelson, and copied to Dr Guy Scott, detailing certain information imparted to the President of the Republic by persons unknown, which would have him believe that I and others are party to a range of actions and decisions causing him and the nation distress - as outlined in your letter.
I must categorically state that as an investor and non-citizen I do not take part in any party political debates or machinations, as is required of me under the conditions of my immigration status; nor did I attend any luncheon with the people whom you have mentioned; nor could I therefore have then been party to any of the alleged resolutions – some of them of an exceedingly serious nature, as they would constitute a grave attack on Zambia and her people.
As the sole corporate member in Zambia of Business Action for Africa (BAA), an organization arising out of the Commission for Africa, my business group – the smallest of all the members, which has - along with fellow members Shell, Unilever and other business giants, been adjudged as being a progressive support for the development of Africa and her peoples. And I have served GRZ in the Department of National Parks & Wildlife for three tours since 1964, having made a small but meaningful and, may I say, altruistic, contribution to natural resource and community development in that time. A steering committee member of the Natural Resources Consultative Forum, I also work in food-aid/poverty reduction advocacy, as a call to the CRBs of Nyalugwe and Luembe, and to the Disaster Management Unit of the Office of the Vice President would confirm.
It is obvious that the Presidency has been deliberately fed information likely to heap ridicule upon it. There lies your enemy.
Yours sincerely,

I. P. A. Manning CBiol
CEO