Africa-Press – Zambia. International Monetray Fund (IMF) President Kristalina Georgieva will be visiting Zambia. We will use the opportunity to demand for an official apology by the IMF to Africa and Zambia for the organisation’s implementation ofbadverse Structural Adjustment Programs (SAP) in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Zambia implemented these programmes from the IMF with zeal and honest but saw the destruction of its economy, de-industrialising of its manufacturing and industrial sector, rise in unemployment, something the country has failed to recover from, rise in institutional and multinational corruption, rise in poverty levels and collapse of its social welfare and social security programmes.
It has been established by numerous studies and reports and our own lives are witnesses to this, that the SAP programmes facilitated multinational interests in Zambia and Africa. It has alos been established that the ineffectiveness of the prgrams occurred because assistance was never the intention!
There has been an increase in corruption, corruption was institutionalised and legitimised by aggressive pre-condition programmes the institution pushed such as privatisation and liberalization.
The SAP programmes led to official spending budget cuts on important welfare services such as education and health care and this widened social inequalities. The budget cuts to social welfare programmes affected the most poorest sections of society.
SAP programmess also increased food insecurity and promoted under-nutrition, rising ill-health, and decreasing access to health care in the two-thirds or more of the population of African countries that already lives below poverty levels.
The IMF have since moved on by attempting to merely reforming the programmes, allow for more domestic consultation and adjust them without apologising for the loss of lives, increase in poverty and de-industrialising Zambia and Africa.
In their new current form, the IMF structural programms remain harmful to the poor and vulnerable, promotes multi-national interests, entrenches liberal policies without regard to the people and their way of life, and their development aim remain narrow.
Sadly the new programmes are fundamentally not different from 1990s ones that caused loss of lives and destruction of nascient economies. We recognise that our leaders have been agent of these programmes and are not exempt from blame or responsibilities for the damage.
To-date our leaders have ensured that the details of the IMF development Agreements and pre-conditions are kept away from our Parliament, the people’sassembly, and therefore escape scrutiny, improvement, or take domestic interests or participation into account.
We hope that President Kristalina Georgieva will apologise for the past destriction done by her institution to our economies, show and demonstrate remorse for the negative programmes and genuinely pledge to stop programmes that harm Zambia and Africa. To this effect, we will take a memorandum of demands to Ms Kristalina Georgieva during her visit to highlight our deep concerns.
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