A Ietter to Maureen Mwanawasa

PLEASE TELL MAUREEN MWANAWASA I CAN OFFER HER FREE DEVELOPMENT LESSONS. AFTER THESE LESSONS SHE WILL TONE DOWN BECAUSE SHE WILL REALISE THE ROT STARTED WAY BACK AND WE ARE SIMPLY GETTING THE EFFECTS OF THE POOR DECISIONS MADE A LONG TIME AGO. READ THE FOLLOWING FACTS:

1. Keeping inflation law, having a good exchange rate and having less debt are good macroeconomic but not reliable development indicators. These are basic indicators of the health of the economy but do not tell you anything regarding poverty, access to basic amenities and social services, income distribution and the quality of services. You can achieve these in the short term but with time pressure mounts to an extent where you struggle to maintain the balance. So in short you are essentially leaving the trouble to the future governments.

2. Magande did well in macroeconomic management but did he do the following:
-building more schools…………………………………………….NO
-building more universities……………………………………….NO
-building better roads………………………………………………NO
-building more hospitals…………………..NO except Levi hospital
-Upgrading UTH and general hospitals……………………..NO
-Investment into manufacturing………………………………..NO
-Diversification from dependency on copper………………NO
-Stepping up value addition……………………………………..NO
-Investment in hydro power generation……………………..NO
-Sustainable solution to mealie meal prices……………….NO
-Improvement in post harvest management………………..NO
-Establishment of medical hubs……………………………….NO
-Establishment of Fuel depots………………………………….NO

True Economic development scholars will tell you that with poor infrastructure, it becomes very difficult to spark development. The state of infrastructure in Zambia was deplorable. With development you cannot jump stages. You cant neglect the basics and jump in to something else expecting to yield the desired results. This negligence led to a state where we needed to pump in more than we had. Let us now long at the problem we have as a country:

-KWACHA PERFORMANCE: Apart from the global poor performances of currencies against the dollar the major factor is that our exports have drastically gone down due to poor performance of copper on the global market and lack of diversification into other sectors such as agriculture and value addition. Now the question is does this sort of investment need 6 months or even two years? How much does a country need to do this? You have to directly invest in this and create an enabling environment for private investors to get into this. This requires pumping money and due to our tight and small budget its a long term plan as the investemnt is incremental. Why wasnt this done all this while? did we expect Edgar Lungu within 8 months to invest into this and produce results maintaining zero borrowing? We are 30 years behind as a country and what we are experiencing is a sum total of poor decisions made way back. The solution to the kwacha is not a monetary one it is a fiscal one.

-DEBT: If you don’t diversify and your major source of revenue is negatively affected how do you hope to run the country without borrowing? Do you increase PAYE? Did we expect Edgar Lungu to diversify the economy within 8 months and raise other sources of revenue. This diversification needs huge investemnt and with the way our country was run down, we needed to pump a lot into creating an enabling environment and incentivise investment, so the question is with deficit budgets we operate on how could this be done in four years?? Again these are long term investments. So how does the country run without borrowing?

-ZESCO: The Zesco problem is a capacity problem. We simply haven’t invested enough in power generation as a country. These are capital investments which require many years to be accomplished. Why didn’t this happen all this while when we knew that consumption will keep increasing? Yes we had a good exchange rate and less debt but why didn’t we invest in more power generation projects? We let the pressure mount to an extent that load shedding kept rising every day and now our dependence on one source has costed us so much. Again this sort of investemnt does not require 8 months. These are long term projects whose implementation requires a lot of borrowed money.
END OF LESSON ONE: TELL MS MWANAWASA TO PREPARE FOR LESSON TWO
Alexander Nkosi