How corporate courts can be beaten

Do Zambia’s lenders care about human life?

Zambia is spending half its budget on debt, as it deals with the impacts of the pandemic, writes ENGWASE MWALE.

Debt has put a huge strain on Zambia’s national budget over the last decade, and Covid-19 has made the situation worse. The government is spending almost 50% of its budget on debt repayments, and as a result spending on critical social sectors has shrunk.

Zambia’s target is to spend 15% of the national budget on health, but since 2012 it has been around 8 to 9%. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, most of our facilities were quite short on important health accessories, equipment and also drugs. Like many African countries, Zambia has had challenges to access Covid vaccines – even today less than 30% of people are vaccinated.

Many rural education facilities still need to be improved, especially secondary schools. There is often not enough funding to ensure they are built and completed, sometimes several years down the line. Many learners are completing primary education but struggling to get to secondary education.

When Zambia’s previous government was procuring most of the loans, the funds were going largely to infrastructure like roads and bridges, without a corresponding investment into production and manufacturing to make sure that there was economic growth. Even as the debt was increasing, unemployment levels were going up. We saw quite a lot of youth and women getting into the informal sector, with no job security.

In the 2021 elections, the people of Zambia and the majority youth came out in numbers to vote for a change of government. People felt that by and large they had been left behind. I think people are quite hopeful that the New Dawn

government is providing a new direction. When it comes to Zambia’s lenders, we feel let down by the fact that the debt situation went overboard and our lenders seemingly did © Xinhua/Shutterstock not have the aspirations of ordinary citizens in mind. We had expected that those who were lending Zambia funds at very exorbitant interest rates would take a keen interest in some of the accountability issues being highlighted by the auditor-general’s reports. But they didn’t. Today any lender that has regard for life would need to look at what is happening and ask ‘How can we help the people of Zambia to be able to regain their economic position as a country?’ It is on this basis that as the Civil Society Debt Alliance we are appealing to all those lenders that have a heart for Zambia to consider cancelling the debt – to provide an opportunity for Zambia to get back on its economic trajectory from a clean slate. Engwase Mwale is a member of the Zambian Civil Society Debt Alliance. This article is based on a talk she gave to a webinar in April. Watch more at:

globaljustice.org.uk/zambia-webinar

A market in Lusaka, capital of Zambia. Fewer than three in ten Zambians have received a Covid-19 vaccine.