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Hope and worry in Zambia, Less poor, less free
The president is making the country’s well-wishers anxious
When Zambia (…) got independence from Britain in 1964, it was one of Africa’s richest and most developed countries. (…) Yet now, largely due to poor leadership, it is one of the poorest. Under President Levy Mwanawasa, who ran the place from 2002 until he died a year ago, things began to look up. But after a year in the job his successor, Rupiah Banda, is beginning to raise fears, especially among foreign investors and donors, that his country may be returning to some of its bad old ways.
One reason is that Mr Banda, who was foreign minister under Zambia’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, has been chumming up with Mr Kaunda’s disgraced successor, Frederick Chiluba. Apart from the successful privatisation of the mines, Mr Chiluba’s ten-year reign from 1991-2001 is remembered mainly for its economic mismanagement and corruption. (…)
In August, to widespread disbelief, Mr Chiluba was acquitted after a six-year criminal trial in a Zambian court (…). The head of a government anti-corruption task force lodged an appeal but was promptly sacked by Mr Banda and the appeal rescinded. Independent organisations called on Zambians to remonstrate by honking their horns every Friday at 5pm. But after some of the protesters were arrested for “disturbing the peace”, the movement petered out. “People are scared,” says a diplomat. “The state is still powerful and potentially nasty.”
Some Western donors [who are giving about a quarter of the government’s spending], also expressed surprise at the government’s decision not to appeal against Mr Chiluba’s acquittal. The state-controlled media then vilified them for meddling in Zambia’s internal affairs and for holding “dark-corner meetings” to plot the government’s overthrow. (…)
(…) Thanks partly to Mr Mwanawasa [ex president], Zambia has been viewed as a stable democracy with independent courts and a fairly free press. Though it is still near the bottom of the UN’s human-development index, it is ranked quite high for governance and freedom, coming 18th out of Africa’s 53 countries. Now it is in danger of slipping.
Its economy, on the other hand, has been doing fairly well, though copper prices dived from nearly $9,000 a tonne in July last year to $2,800 in December. (…). According to the finance minister, copper accounts for 17% of Zambia’s GDP (a third, if you include spin-offs) and 80% of foreign earnings.
After a recent two-week inspection, an IMF team praised the government for its fiscal management in a hard time, and says GDP should go on growing by more than 5% this year after expanding by an average of nearly 6% for the past nine years, Zambia’s longest period of growth since independence. But it needs to grow by at least 7% to reduce poverty appreciably. Some two-thirds of Zambia’s 12m-plus people live below the poverty line. And more than 100,000 Zambians die every year from malaria and HIV/AIDS.
