Africa-Press – Zambia. International Monetary Fund (IMF) Deputy Managing Director, Dr. Nigel Clarke, is in Zambia on a 3-day working visit to discuss progress made under the Fund supported programmes, and the debt restructuring exercise.
In the last 3 years, the IMF approved an Extended Credit Facility (ECF) for Zambia in 2022, providing a $1.3 billion loan program over 38 months.
To address the country’s drought and continued economic challenges, the IMF provided an increased as an augmentation of access under the ECF, bringing the total funding to $1.7 billion.
IMF’s driven liberal programs and forced privatisation program of state-owned enterprises in the 90s are behind Zambia’s de-industralisation and rapid fall into high poverty levels and high unemployment rates.
The IMF has been criticized for its loan conditions, interventions, and structure.
The IMF loans and policies cause the following harm:
1. Create dependency
The IMF’s safety net encourages reckless economic policies and delays reforms, creating long-term dependency.
2. Harm the poor
Austere loan conditions and uniform policy prescriptions deepen financial crises and disproportionately hurt the poorest people.
3. Damage economies
IMF interventions in impoverished countries are overly ambitious and intrusive, and loan conditions are out of touch with reality.
Rescue bad investments
The IMF rescues international bankers who make bad loans, encouraging riskier investments.
4. Lack accountability
The IMF is immune from legal action, and its opaque investments make it difficult for communities to hold it accountable. The damage done to the economy in the 90s by their Structural Adjustment Program can never be atoned.
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) were a set of economic policies implemented by the IMF and the World Bank to address economic crises in developing countries had negative impacts on social welfare and undermined national sovereignty. The programs increased poverty, decreased economic stability, and negative failure to achieve long-term economic growth.
5. Act as gatekeepers
The IMF, with member states help create and choose NGOs to act as echo chambers to manifacture purported public consesus.
6. Promotes Neo-liberalism
The IMF has imposed neoliberal policies like privatization and free markets on developing countries without recourse to local conditions and state of economies.
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