SO PARLIAMENT HAS NO HAND?

By Gershom Ndhlovu

 

“The economic problems facing the country are not from Zambia but from outside the country and it’s not parliament that controls the economy, but the government through the Ministry of Finance, so for him to think like that, it shows that his thinking is limited to politicking,” science and technology deputy minister, Jonas Shakafuswa is quoted to have said in a recent issue of the Post in reference PF president Michael Sata.

Sata had blamed the economic meltdown in the country to the MPs who had voted huge salaries and allowances for themselves.

I hope I have not misunderstood Shakafuswa, but from his statement, it appears that parliament is detached from the control of the Zambian economy, leaving such matters to the technocrats and bureaucrats at the Finance Ministry.

This explains why Zambia procures bilateral and multilateral debts which our parliamentarians have no idea about and the country ends up paying some of the debts perpetually because nobody, least of all parliament, knows or understands and to whom they are paid.

The simple reason is that parliament has no say in the economic direction the country takes. It equally explains why the Auditor General’s reports, when they are taken before the Parliamentary Public accounts Committee, are merely grossed over.

It probably explains the Anti-Corruption Commission’s disclosure recently that between 60 and 70 percent of the reports it receives involve civil servants. Maybe civil servants engage in corruption because they know that parliament has failed to provide the necessary legislative guidelines the economy is supposed to take.

Neither controlling officer nor junior civil servant exposed by the Auditor General’s office has been jailed for appropriating public funds. The simple reason is that parliament has no control over what goes on in the civil service in general and the ministry of finance in particular.

From my limited understanding of parliament, this wing of government is supposed to provide the general direction of a country’s economy through the laws it enacts, particularly the budget.

But if it does not do so, then I am afraid that there is no reason for its existence if all its going to do is make laws such as the Public Order Act that curtail people’s freedom of assembly.

The International Monetary Fund recently noted about Zambia: "While the fiscal policy stance has generally been prudent in recent years, budget execution has exhibited weaknesses. In particular, the pattern of spending has deviated significantly from what has been budgeted, notably in regard to capital spending… 

 "The tight resource constraints and challenging environment that Zambia faces in the near term further underscore the urgency of structural reforms that would allow the most effective use of available resources and enhance the competitiveness of the Zambian economy.”

This is definitely one area where parliament’s monitoring role needs to come in. We have, time and time again, heard how money meant for roads, bridges, and other capital projects, has been diverted towards recurrent expenditure such as talk time for permanent secretaries and other senior government officers.

We can only speculate where most, of the money ends up if not in the construction of private mansions in Chalala, Mass Media complex area and Lusaka West.

And as Sata feared, most of our members of parliament do not bat an eyelid when voting for themselves huge salaries and allowances when the rest of the citizens cannot even afford K45,000 for a bag of roller meal. These are the people’s representatives who have no problem being paid huge allowances for sitting on the National Constitution Conference on top of their equally big parliamentary and ministerial salaries and allowances.
Compare and contrast Zambia’s economic situation with that of America. In the last few weeks the world has seen how both outgoing Republican George Bush and incoming Democrat president Barack Obama have been trying to lobby congress to authorize a massive injection of money to kick-start the flagging economy. There is no arbitrariness by anybody in the American government as to how best to resolve the economic meltdown which has affected almost every nation on the planet.

….

Zambia is slowly but surely proving to be a grave yard for airlines. The latest victim to join the long list of airlines that have met their demise in the country in the last 15 years is the Zambian Airways which has suspended operations pending re-organisation (well, they all say that).

Apart from Zambia Airways which was dishonourably liquidated in a nocturnal announcement by the then Vice President General Godfrey Miyanda in 1994, others such as Aero Zambia and Zambian Express Airways graced the skies but for a short time.

Zambia Airways, the national flag carrier, had faithfully served the nation since 1967 when it was set up by the Kaunda regime, I suppose for patriotic as well as prestigious reasons. After all, every independent African nation was establishing its own national airline.

It is not quite clear why Aero Zambia folded up but for Zambian Express Airways, it was said that it failed to pay lease charges for its aircraft and therefore the owners withdrew their equipment.

Whichever direction the problems facing Zambian Airways take it to, it probably makes the end of an era for the former Mine Air Services before it was privatized and its name changed to Zambian Airways among whose directors are Lusaka lawyers, the Mutembo brothers, Nchima and Nchito.

One would only hope that politics have not played a part in the problems that Zambian Airways has faced in the last few months relating to the former finance minister Ng’andu Magande who was said to favour bailing it out by deferring the debt it owes/owed the National Airport Corporation and the support for his candidature for president by some of its shareholders, notably the Post through its Chief Executive Fred M’membe.

The consolation though is that Zambian Airways just joins the long queue of airlines that have folded up on the international aviation scene in the last one year. High profile airlines to have gone bust in the last six months include Zoom Airlines and XL Leisure which were budget airlines in Europe.

 

LAW UNFAIR TO MAUREEN

By Gershom Ndhlovu

 

Admittedly, I am one of those people who opposed former First Lady, Maureen Mwanawasa, from taking over from her husband, the late Levy Mwanawasa, at what was to be the end of his tenure of office in 2011 following a clamour from some MMD cadres.

I argued then that Maureen would have been at an advantage over other contenders having already been in State House as a spouse of a sitting president. I said then that Maureen should wait for 2016 to launch her bid for the presidency giving her a break of five years after her husband would have left State House.

Sadly, President Mwanawasa died midway through his second term of office and, unfortunately, Maureen is legally, at least according to Attorney General Mumba Malila, barred from holding public office otherwise she risks losing her entitlement to her late husband’s benefits.

At the moment, Maureen as a widow is entitled to 50 per cent of the incumbent president’s salary, a house to be built in an area of her choice among other benefits.

“According to the Former Presidents Benefits Act, the widow is allowed to enjoy such benefits jointly with children below the age of 21 until she dies as long as she does not go into politics or joins the Government,” Malila was quoted as saying just before President Mwanawasa was interred last September.

President Mwanawasa died in France in August close to seven weeks after he suffered a stroke at the African Union heads of state summit in Egypt.

It is this legal position as given by Malila that I--and I am sure, many others--find problematic. Why should the law bar Maureen, or indeed any other presidential widow (excuse the term), from holding public office because the first lady is never a head of state but a spouse of the president and it is therefore unfair to bar her from enjoying her constitutional rights and freedoms of aspiring for any public office in the land on account of her late husband’s position.

This is akin to saying that a widow of a policeman cannot herself become a policewoman because her late husband was once a policeman and if she does so, she loses her husband’s death benefits. It is such laws that Zambians have fought against over time such as women not being able to get loans on their own account, women not being entitled to land title and not being able to apply for passports for their children without the consent of the children’s fathers.

I am very sure that a widower who happened to be married to a female president would not go through all these legal hurdles if she died while in office.

Some may argue that as it is Maureen is guaranteed a cushy life from the benefits accrued to her from her late husband’s estate, but the corollary is that Maureen is not only a strong individual, but she also has the intellectual capacity to meet the challenges of any public office including the presidency.

Maureen’s unfortunate circumstances should never be wished on anybody but it would be most unfortunate if the nation locked her away in the widows’ house and never considered her for public office. This is of course not to deny the fact that most widows have struggled for years to get their meagre benefits from government and have led lives of penury as a result.

Maureen now runs the Maureen Mwanawasa Community Initiative which other people would argue will keep her occupied, but considering that her husband is no more, the goodwill that the NGO receives from donors will eventually dry up and she will increasingly get isolated.

Non-governmental Organisations Coordinating Committee (NGOCC) and other groups should take up this issue so that all widows, regardless at what level their husbands served, are legally treated equally regarding the right to any job in the land including the presidency.

The National Constitution Conference should also work towards eliminating such glaring imbalances in the constitution it is currently drafting. It is important that the NCC delegates seal all loopholes that would deprive anybody of their rights, freedoms and even duties now that an appropriate opportunity has arisen to do so.

And still on the issue of presidential retirement benefits, a few days ago a friend of mine raised a very important question of a person who has served as president for three years, five years, seven year or 10 years entitled to the same retirement benefits.

The retirement benefits, he argued, should be calculated on a pro-rata basis to reflect the number of years served. You could not have put it any better, Brother Evans.

…….

For Christmas, I received a very unusual gift, a book entitled “The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence” by Martin Meredith, a man who in the mid-1960s worked as a journalist on the Times of Zambia.

In the book, Meredith traces what went wrong at independence and through the years clearly blaming the leadership that usurped political and economic power for the benefit of cronies while looting national treasuries.

He spares no country from Algeria in the north to Zimbabwe in the south, from Mauritania in the west to Somalia in the east, laying bare the vagaries of leaders like Jean-Bedel Bokassa and the fancies of Felix Houphouet-Boigny who went on to build a basilica larger than the one at the Vatican, the seat of the Catholic Church, when his people suffered.

He exposes the corrupt regime of Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire who could tell his people to steal, but bit by bit. To-date, the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo, has never fully recovered from the erratic personality of the revered Patrice Lumumba who was killed with the complicity of the Central Intelligence Agency and Belgium forces to the current leadership of Joseph Kabila.

To quote musician Bob Geldof’s view of the book as it appears on the cover: “You cannot even begin to understand contemporary African politics if you have not read this fascinating book.”

 

 

FOOD FIRST

By Gershom Ndhlovu

Just under two decades ago, during my undergraduate days at the University of Zambia, I did a course under what was then African Development Studies which was called the Food Crisis and Agrarian Crisis in Africa.

During that course, I came across a book entitled Food First by Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins one line of which has been etched on my mind over these years--the scandalous use of fertilisers on golf courses and on non-food crops around the world which in turn pushes up the price of the commodity for the poor to afford.

In Lappe’s work through the Institute for Food and Development under whose auspices she wrote Food First, she has argued that world hunger is caused not by the lack of food but rather by the inability of hungry people to gain access to the abundant amount of food that exists in the world and/or food-producing resources because they are simply too poor.

According to her biography on Wikipedia, she has posited that our current "thin democracy" creates a maldistribution of power and resources that inevitably creates waste and an artificial scarcity of the essentials for sustainable living.

Lappe makes the radical argument that what she calls "living democracy," i.e. not only what we do in the voting booth but through our daily choices of what we buy and how we live, provides a mental and behavioral framework of goods and goodness that is aligned with our basic human nature. She believes that only by "living democracy" can we effectively solve today's social and environmental crises.

Quite clearly, my Food Crisis course has now come home to roost considering that Zambia is probably going through the worst ever patch of a maize shortage not caused by drought or similar calamities, but one caused by poor policies and bad decision making by our government.

At the beginning of the year, under the false pretence of a bumper harvest, our decision makers were falling all over themselves to export maize to a neighbouring country itself undergoing a serious political, economic and social crisis. It appears that the government did not foresee a shortfall in its national maize stocks.

The current food situation in the country where mealie meal prices are skyrocketing is a serious indictment of the Food Reserve Agency which is not only mandated to scour and secure maize stocks in the country, but to release it in times like this. After exporting maize to Zimbabwe, barely six months later it is talking about importing grain at an even higher price than it disposed of its own grain.

But again, the lack of seriousness by the FRA forces peasant farmers in border areas to sell their crop in neighbouring countries with properly functioning grain marketing companies such as those living on the border with Malawi who sell their maize to the Agriculture Development and Marketing Corporation (ADMARC), and to neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo where there is a ready market for mealie meal.

According to a Michigan State University (MSU) study quoted by the UN’s IRIN news service a series of actions which tipped the food security situation in Zambia to worrying levels. According to the MSU, The country produced less maize in 2008. The Food Reserve Agency (FRA) set a buying price of 45,000 kwacha per tonne (about $260 per tonne) and banned private exports. The "nervousness of the markets" prompted traders to buy at prices higher than the FRA floor price. FRA in turn hiked prices again.

However, the game of ping pong between the government and the Zambia National Farmers Union also exposes a lack of a clear ideology in terms of farming as a business from which farmers are expected to make a profit from their activity. Accusations and counter-accusations of hoarding just show what is lacking in terms of general agricultural policy.

In a liberalized economy such as exists in Zambia, demand and supply dictate prices. As agricultural economists would say, a glut on the market will depress prices while prices of a commodity in shot supply will naturally go up. It is definitely a no-win situation for both the farmers who under pressure to conform to some form of social responsibility by supplying cheap maize, and to the consumer who has to face market forces for the staple.

Is it any wonder then that commercial farmers shun growing maize for other cash crops such as rose flowers, asparagus and other exotic crops which are not even consumed by local Zambians?

……

I first met Kashiwa Bulaya in 1995 when he was deputy permanent secretary at the ministry of health during a trip of then health minister Michael Sata to the Eastern Province where he travelled to tour health institutions there.

At that time, Bulaya’s task was to mobilize reporters who accompanied Sata on the tour. We, the reporters, met Bulaya at the Pamodzi Hotel where we were to spend the night because the flight on a Zambia Flying Doctors Service plane from the Lusaka International Airport was to be quite early in the morning.

When we arrived back from the Eastern Province a day later, he gave us a lift from the airport to our various homes. Incidentally, I was the last one to be dropped in Chilenje South where I lived then. When we got home, I found that my daughter who was three then, was ill. Bulaya offered to give me and my wife a lift to the UTH.

That episode and subsequent encounters showed that Bulaya was a good man who would not hurt a fly, always helpful and very respectful he would almost kneel when talking to you.

Then rumours started flying about his private and official dealings and that is when it dawned that his appearance of a lamb actually masked the fox in him. I am not surprised that he is now a guest of the very government he served at “Hotel Chimbokaila” where he is starting a five year sentence.

Good work there, Mr Max Nkole and your team. There are, however, still other foxes masquerading as lambs out there. Hunt them, please.