MDGs among the Zambian youths

MDGs, BEYOND RHETORIC
“It was an easy Budget to prepare” bragged the Zambian Finance Minister Ng’andu Magande shortly before presenting the National Budget for 2007. Talking to the media just before presenting the National Financial Plan to Parliament, the minister said he was carrying ‘a lot of good news’ to the general public. Some of the promissory issues the minister showered the media with were those to do with debt write-offs, which he said the citizenry were the major beneficiary as the ‘olive branch’ was being extended to them through developmental action programmes the country was embarking on using realised savings from debt write-offs after attaining the Highly Indented Poor Countries completion point (HPIC) status in 2006.

But putting aside the Budget speech’s rhetoric and critically examining things to do with national development under the theme “From Stability to Improved Service Delivery,” it is clear that most of the contentious issues contained in the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) the Zambian government under the New Deal leadership embraced, are missed out at the starting point of the ‘race.’ The New Deal leadership committed itself to eradicating poverty and hunger in their extreme forms by signing the Millennium Declaration when it came into power in 2001. The Government committed itself to offering people a descent standard of living they deserved as reflective in the great natural resource endowment of their country. The new government promised to provide ways of making the citizenry enjoy other human choices, particularly the choices of long and healthy life, to be knowledgeable and join the information explosion of the 21st centaury. And the Minister of Finance told the media that time had come for Zambians to enjoy their sweat. Get it how!

Phenomenally, or to sound a committed and idealistic government maybe, the New Deal Government, under the leadership of Levy Mwanawasa, embarked on MDGs ‘prima facial’ projects, some of which include: the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP); Thirty percent (30%) Women Presentation in leadership positions; free basic education (from grade one up to nine); malaria eradication programmes; Fifth National Development Plan (FNDP); Vision 2030; and belonging to several regional and global groupings that are oriented towards poverty eradication and other ills of life. Therefore, the country’s Transitional National Development Plan was particularly built around PRSP, to make sure that proportions of the people living in poverty were reduced to 65% by the targeted time frame. And to be a bit practical, billions of Kwacha (or millions of Dollars) were allocated for poverty reduction programmes, though they were paradoxically consumption-oriented. For example, under the sub-heading “poverty reduction,” the Ministry of Works and Supply, was allocated more than US$8 million for the procurement of VIP motor vehicle consumables. WHAOO, Poverty reduction indeed! The VIP cocoon includes; ministers, their deputies, permanent secretaries, and chiefs, among others. Then how is the ordinary man taking part in sharing the ‘national cake’ in exclusion as promised by the Minister of Finance in his message to the public prior to the presentation of the budget?

Against this background, the Zambian Central Statistical Office in its Demographic Healthy Survey Report for 2006 indicate that on the basis of the current HIV/AIDS infection rate, more than 750,000 children are likely to be orphaned and possibly join the purgatory of streetism circus by 2015 in addition to the current more than 13,000 street kids. The Report further show that the HIV/AIDS infection rate was between 13-20% among the youths of ages 15-35. And in response to such ‘foreseen’ challenges, government under the Ministry of Social Welfare and Community Development has involved 31 child-related institutions like child-care and adoption societies, orphanages, street children rehabilitation centres, Young Men Christian Association (YMCA), Young women Christian Association (YWCA)- Zambia , among others. And under the above institutions’ poverty reduction programmes for rehabilitation and reintegration of street children, (after they had graduated from Zambia National Services (ZNS) camps where they have been taken since 2006 for skills training programmes) have been allocated a disheartening total of US$8 million as compared to the lump sum allocated for VIP luxury. But more to this ‘joke’, many of these street children rehabilitation programmes did not solve the issue of streetism because many of the children who were chosen to go for these skills trainings were not real street kids, but were relatives and dependants to some officials in the Ministry. At the programme’s worst, some ‘street kids’ were married and their husbands opened law suits against the ministry for marital interference and the programmes’ success is yet to be seen.

The Budgetary allocation circus does not end here. The Social Sector Developments, under which almost all the MDGs, which include: eradication of extreme poverty and hunger; achieving universal primary education; promoting gender equality and empowerment of women; reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensuring environmental sustainability; and developing a global partnership for development fall, had a ‘Budgetary joke’ to share. Minister Magande revealed that in line with Governments’ commitment to improve service delivery in the education sector, the remaining 4000 trained teachers (out of than the 10,000) that could not be employed during the period the country was struggling to attain HIPC were to be posted into schools to offset the shortfall of teachers where in some schools, a single teacher managed and taught all grades.

Miraculously perhaps, the Finance Minister reassured Government’s commitment to empowering people through education, and he elaborated on the vital role the service plays in the attainment of development and MDGs themselves. He argued that it was not very difficult in the country like Zambia with favourable climate, excellent soils, and plentiful water, to feed all people and make them meet their basic needs. And when it comes to food, it should include appropriate caloric intakes to prolong living and services so long they (people) are enlightened through education on how to go with the chemistry than waiting for state intervention all the time. The minister further expounded that educated people are not defeatists, as they are creative and positive thinkers. Minister Magande further argued that an educated populace pursues opportunities and initiate change in order to have an environment suitable for new opportunities and they knowledgeably increase the value of their output per day or year and proportionally to state confers through tax. Verbal commitment, could it be?

A glimpse into the allocations to the Social Sector Developments section, under which almost all the MDGs fall, would however prove it all. Under Ministry Education (MoE) umbrella, poverty reduction programmes for the Ministry received about US$9 million for the University of Zambia’s (UNZA) outstanding bills from 2006, while the Research and University education at the same institution (UNZA) got less than US$18 million. Since the country has two public universities, the other university ( Copperbelt University ) got slightly more than US$6 million in the same capacity of Research and University education. Under the students’ loan and bursary awards, UNZA was allocated US$9.6 million in 2006, which was reduced to US$5.7 million and from US$4.8 million in 2006 to US$2.47 million for the Copperbelt University (CBU). Enhancement of more than eight thousand UNZA students’ welfare and learning got about US$6 million, while the Copperbelt University ’s three thousand four hundred got US$2.4 million. Against these allocations, the Minister of Education, Prof Geoffrey Lungwangwa (who is a former UNZA Deputy Vice Chancellor) told the Zambian Parliamentary Accounting Committee (PAC) that UNZA alone requires more than five thousand bed spaces to supplement the current three thousand six hundred spaces that carter for the whole students’ populace at the institution. And as an immediate ‘remedial’ measure, the UNZA management reduced the enrollment level o the university for the 2006/2007 academic year by 15%. Some reasons forwarded for this are that some students were forced to stay four on a single bed space sharing a single bed by making shifts on who sleeps up what time.

Considering the nauseating pictures of starving and malnourished children which has become almost the identifying feature in most of Zambia’s high density townships, there is need to take a holistic approach in improving people’s living standards in the country. It was this realisation maybe which prompted some Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in the country to be giving food supplements to designated centres like orphanages. Poor caloric intakes have compromised the health of most pregnant mothers and children and thus Zambia has seen a rise in the child mortality rate. Since there are many causes of child mortality, many instruments are needed to reduce the trend. Improving people’s incomes, strengthening focus on public health care, access to safe to drinking water, improved sanitation and education for girls and mothers could be some of them. As in the case of the other health-related goals, the development of health services, particularly primary health services, is an important pre-requisite for reducing maternal mortality. It is important that child bearing women attend health clinics. But in most instances they are prevented by long distances to nearest clinics and lack of medical personnel to attend to them even when they braved the distance. Worse still, their financial situations and some traditional dogmas contribute to the sad scenario.

In respect with the inhuman situations under which most children and child-bearing women find themselves in, Government in 2006 recruited 744 front line medical personnel and had other projects in far-flung areas aimed at harnessing the high mortality rates on the land. The health sector was for this matter allocated US$3 billion in the 2007 budget. But to the dismal of every patriotic Zambian, the Auditor General’s Office revealed to Parliament when it appeared before the Parliamentary Accounting Committee (PAC) that the Ministry of Health was the most difficult ministry to audit due a number of irregularities by controlling officers in the disbursement and spending public funds. The Auditor General, Anna Chifungula cited an example of misappropriation of public resources in a case where the Ministry of Health ordered expired drugs at a cheaper price between 2005 and 2006 costing more than US$5 million and spent US$5 thousand on Christmas cards in 2006, while more than fifty thousand Zambians were dying from malaria every year as indicated by the Demographic Health Survey in its quarterly publication “Nkwaku.” The figure is however predicted to rise due to lack of accountability by the Ministry as the then minister of health, Angela Cifire indicated in her address on the World Tuberculosis Day that some medical personnel in the Ministry of Health were selling anti-malaria drugs like coartem to businessmen for export to neighbouring countries.

The Auditor General further reports that at the Ministry of Health, the permanent secretary had allocated and approved for himself (not entitled) more than US$180 thousand for fuel for his personal vehicle and about US$7 thousand in 2006, while pregnant mothers at the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) were giving birth on the floor due to lack of bed spaces and extra beds to meet the high demand for health services. Worse still, many government owned health centres often only give prescriptions to patients because of lack of drugs and thus one child in every ten born children die to minor curable diseases. In such an environment where misappropriation of public funds is at the highest peak, the attainment of MDGs in many health related circles is blurred. And according to Transparent International Zambia (TIZ) in its annual Corruption Perception Index, misappropriation (corruption) of public resources was more pronounced in the New Deal leadership of president Mwanawasa than in the previous government. Comparatively, the Index indicates that more than US$150 million were misappropriated by the civil service in 2006 alone against US$50 million in the preceding leadership, whose president (Frederick Chiluba) is facing charges in the courts of law and have been recently convicted and told by the London Court to pay back the US$41 million of the public funds he stole from the country while serving as the state president from 1991 to 2001. And in his address to the nation in March 2006, President Mwanawasa revealed that civil servants misappropriated more than US$0.7 billion between 2001 when he assumed office and 2005. To this effect, the president banned the use of the slogan “zero tolerance” against corruption because corruption levels in the civil service “was stinking,” hence he saw no need to continue using the slogan.

Considering the corrosive nature of corruption to social and economic development, there can be less achievement of MDGs in Zambia as the economy is mainly left with almost nothing for sustaining national developmental projects. The poor are the hardest hit when such happens. At the same time, the quality of the public infrastructure becomes lower in heavily corrupt environments. It is upon the government to of Zambia to put its financial management more clearly on the agenda in its dialogue with partner countries, particularly in discussions on poverty reduction strategies since many donors have in the recent pat warned the country to manage donor money well or they will stop sponsoring proposed projects to them because levels of corruption were alarming. Since MDGs are linked to each other and are mutually dependent, and being that almost all the MDGs are based on fundamental human rights, sustainable development is crucial in this call. This applies, among other things, to the fundamental right to life, the right to food, the right to health, the right to education, the rights of women and children and the right to housing, which are only attainable with the proper utilisation of public resources in projects that do not compromise the success of the future generations. The question that immediately rings in one’s head is on whether Zambia is doing enough towards the fulfillment of these rights as a signatory to the UN Fundamental Human Rights (FHRs) of 1948. All one has to take into account in this analysis would be the level of financial accountability by financial controllers, and then the apt answer to the concern of meeting the obligations enshrined in the FHRs would be gigantic-NO.

Zambia categorically should put more emphasis on improving initiatives targeting specific sectors, such as good governance and social sector development, where most MDGs fall, such as education, health and poverty reduction, among others, especially that the country has recorded disheartening financial abuses in the civil service. The country need to set clear political priorities, with the ultimate goal of improving governance and enhancing public confidence in it. Improved governance is absolutely crucial in attaining MDGs to the part of Zambia because many people have lost confidence in the system especially after learning of the abuses going on in the governing systems. This scenario has worsened poverty levels and other social vices as people ‘utilise’ whatever is within their means to earn a living. Thus, poverty levels in Zambia is wide-spread with no area untouched, though it is more predominantly rising faster in the urban areas where categories of the poor has emerged as policies of the economic liberalisation pursued in the 1990s failed to create jobs. A number of those ones in formal employment thus found themselves among the unemployed. Equally, new entrants into the labour markets, especially the youths face unprecedented difficulties to get jobs since the main employing sector (private sector) in the country is mainly concerned with profit accumulation rather than training the new entrants on how to go with the jobs. The net effect of this has been persistent poverty and hunger interrelated with other factors, including the erosion of people’s asset base, failed livelihoods and poor access to infrastructure, unsupportive global and domestic economic environment and failing health, especially due to HIV/AIDS and other major diseases.

Since poverty and hunger are about people being denied their most fundamental needs and expectations, then there’s need for government to understand and tackle this problem, with the concept of people being at the centre of everything that is done. In this respect, there’s a need for a paradigm shift towards that which takes the human development model together with its associated concepts such as human poverty (which can be defined as a denial of the people opportunities and choices that are most basic to human development), places the well-being and deprivation of the people in their various dimensions at the centre. This concept provides and requires a comprehensive framework in which the poverty and hunger can be understood and interventions evaluated. This should be done to decrease malnutrition levels among small children who are often on high risk of having their physical and mental development impaired. The net effect of this is decline in life expectancy at birth, enrolment and literacy achievements. These reductions in the country’s human development status are a cause for great concern as they undermine people’s capabilities to deal with poverty, deprivation and hunger.

When it comes to access to clean water and good health, the Zambian water sector is considerably off-track in terms of meeting the MDGs. Challenges in water and sanitation include major inequalities in service delivery, low levels of sustainability and under-investment. In addition, there is under-spending of the already low budget allocation to the sector. However, it is a truism that poverty reduction is a valid issue in the wider sector, but the voice of the poor is not easily heard by those responsible for service delivery and resource management. Therefore, more real commitment from politicians and relevant professionals is necessary in order to address even issues of capacity building. The environment of the water sector (social, cultural, technical, economic and natural) is in constant challenge and thus these new challenges call for new skills in all stake holders in the sector for this right (water) to be fulfilled.

Government should create and maintain a stable macroeconomic environment that fiscally aims at reducing the tax burden in the formal sector by broadening the tax base through the development of a system of incentives that would draw in the informal sector into the formal sector, while at the same time reducing the tax rates in the formal sector. Similarly, government should prioritise its expenditures towards the social sector and infrastructure development, especially roads, telecommunication, among others. All and above, transparency should be held by continuity with Activity Based Budget together with an effective integrated information system that allows the public true and accurate information on the utilization of resources to avoid wastage.

In the same vein, in case where government can’t create employment at the rate of population growth, there is need for the promotion of joint ventures in retail business, manufacturing and / or establishment of a local development fund to help in developing Zambia entrepreneurs. Such indigenous empowerment programmes or revolving funds should aim at employment generation to new entrants into the labour market; be itself, formal or informal employment. There is also need to create an environment that supports public-private partnerships in infrastructure development and other developmental areas as per requirement by some Millennium Development Goals. Government should come up with programmes and policies that empower the citizenry rather than spoon feeding them and wean them when “accounts” dry as it is currently the case with Youth Empowerment programmes and Skills Training projects for Street children, which only pop up when real resources are available.

Much investment must equally be made in the education sector, so that people are able to understand and make positive contributions to national programmes. Currently, being that most of the people are not educated or lack better understanding of issues, they do not contribute anything to many programmes the country is trying to embark on as a way of alleviating poverty and other social and economic ills of the country’s plummet economy. These high levels of ignorance among the Zambians have for example hindered the clinically approved measures of preventing diseases like HIV/AIDS because some people associate it to witchcraft especially in the rural set-up. And currently, many HIV/AIDS patients in the country are abandoning antiretroviral drugs in preference to herbal medicine which is being popularized in most parts of Zambia . A lot of herbalists have come out in the open claiming that they have found the cure for the virus and some patients on ARVs quit the treatment for they have little faith in conventional medicine. Additionally, according to the 2005 Zambia Sexual Behaviour Survey (ZSBS) report, 13 % of Zambians have ever been tested for HIV mainly because many of them have not accepted the virus to be a ‘disease’ but something embedded into magic whose ‘cure’ lies in traditional healers and other ritual appeasements. Against this sad scenario, the report stated that there was also a declining trend in condom use among people with non-regular partners, indicating that there is very little improvement in risky behaviour. The report stated that despite the high levels of general knowledge about HIV/AIDS, there was a misconception about the pandemic’s transmission, a trend which has been seen a 38 and 29 per cent condom use decline among males and females respectively in their last sexual encounter.

Besides that, uneducated people add little value to the production sector. When they do, their labour is often of low quality as they have no expertise relevant in improving product quality day by day. They are equally defeatists, they do not have the resilience to rise again after a fall and they also do not have the required consultative mentality, which have helped other countries score impressive economic achievements by building on other people’s innovative ideas. But currently, many Zambians are not aware of many programmes that the country is carrying on. Even when it comes to human rights, illiterates do not know what they are entitled to by the law. In such chaotic scenarios, it is only the enlightened ones who benefits from the projects that are going on in the country. To be practical, according to the Environmental Council of Zambia’s Sanitation Department, in 2005, some residents of the Copperbelt province refused to throw away the fish that died from the affluent from the mining and other industries that was emitted into the Kafue River , which is a river that stretches across the country from the north to the south. Government had to use the Council and state police to confiscate the fish, some of which was being sold on the market to the unsuspicious buyers. Also, many illiterates have condemned civil society groups that are calling on the government to enact the new constitution through the constituent assembly saying they cannot eat the ‘piece, of paper. All because they are denied education for them to appreciate the role the ‘piece’ of paper can play in improving their lives if enacted through a mode that embraces the majority’s will.

Zambia therefore has to revisit and re-organise herself on how she would improve her scores towards MDGs because currently the pace is too slow. There is need for a paradigm shift for meaningful achievements to be realised by the stipulated time or reverse the sad snail space the country is currently moving. The public good should be the core of all the programmes towards the alleviation of poverty rather than personal motives. A holistic approach on the fight against corruption which has proved to be a biggest enemy of development has to be used for the ultimate benefit of the every one even the common man.