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.
