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
