Maravi

Let the truth be said always

Let the truth be said always
Written by Editor

IT is frightening that after the strong opposition Rupiah Banda and his government faced over increasing the salaries of ministers and other politicians, today they have decided to introduce a bill in this sitting of Parliament to empower the Minister of Finance to prescribe, by statutory instrument, the emoluments payable to the holder of the office of Vice-President, Speaker, deputy speaker, Cabinet minister, leader of the opposition, chief whip, deputy chief whip, deputy minister, deputy chairperson of committees and private member of the National Assembly.

If they could ignore public opinion and all that opposition and go ahead to increase their salaries through an Act of Parliament, what will happen when they are free to quietly and secretly increase their emoluments through a statutory instrument? Whose opposing voice are they going to listen to when they have all the powers to simply pass a statutory instrument and increase their salaries? This is corruption.

And corruption is a serious indictment to level against our politicians. It is important therefore to define what we mean by corruption here, so as to place their actions in a proper perspective.

In general life, we associate corruption with bribery, kickbacks, or misappropriation of public funds and property. But corruption can also be defined as impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle; a departure from the original or from what is pure and correct. To what extent can we therefore say that the actions of our politicians over their emoluments fall within the parameters of this definition?

It is no doubt that politicians, that is the President, ministers and members of parliament, are among the highest paid people in this country, especially those drawing a salary from government. Furthermore, the high emoluments of our politicians compare poorly with the low per capita economic figures in Zambia and the poor performance of our politicians all the way from President to councillor. Their huge emoluments compare grimly with the dismal pay Zambians get in general and the fact that most of the population lives on less than US$ 1 per day.

Our cost of government is too high. Our cost of running the ministries, and the National Assembly, all of which are current, and the benefits of which deliberately relate to certain persons and do not indeed really benefit the generality of Zambians is too high. And because of that very high cost, there is little left for capital projects. Again of course, we know that the level of efficiency in even utilising that capital sum over the years has been questionable. We only hope that better things will be done.

Even if not documented, it is there for all to see, feel, live and experience in the daily lives of the majority of Zambians. Clearly, there is need to shrink this incredible cost of governance in the country.

We should all be alarmed and fearful. What is going on in all the three arms of government are tantamount to, if not worse than, bold-faced, daylight robbery of the people of Zambia. We were recently told by Rupiah at his last press conference that 50 per cent of government's domestic revenues are spent on one per cent of the population which includes, among others, ministers. It is clear that our rulers consume such a high percentage of the total revenue that accrues to it in the name of governance. If this is not daylight, brazen robbery, please tell us what it is. This issue again highlights that our politicians are highly irresponsible and insensitive, and hence the reasons we find ourselves in the mess we are in today, and to which escape seems very impossible, unless very drastic measures and actions are really taken.

One of the crux or factors that are gulping our income is the emoluments of public office holders. The emoluments of public office holders and the judiciary amounts to half of our country's annual budget. And if we add the daily allocation to each of these officers for biscuits and tea, the choice of cars in the convoy of these political appointees and the fuel that propels them, the cost of governance becomes monumental. Surely, this cannot be right and is unsustainable. It also shows that our political office holders are not serving us, but serving their own pockets, and we are serving them too. It is a master-slave relationship. In effect, Zambian politics is self-servicing instead of a call to service. Public office holders live far above the citizens they are expected to serve, thus becoming disconnected from the sufferings and yearnings of the people.

With all these waste and profligacy, corruption, mismanagement, it is no wonder that the government - in all the three arms - hardly has any money left to carry out infrastructural development or maintenance, hence the poor and moribund state of our roads, healthcare system, schools and even public buildings. The government simply does not have enough money to do anything about provision of basic amenities to our people, because the money has gone into individual pockets.

Unless the existing government system is reviewed and restructured to promote greater accountability, optimal performance and drastic reduction of the current astronomical cost of operating the system, the yearnings of our people will be unwarranted. This is why we do not take the words or speeches of our politicians seriously. They like going to press conferences or briefings accompanied by the best speeches and rhetoric in the world, and full of promises, but as soon as they leave, that is the end of it. No wonder even monkeys are annoyed with some of them and urinate on them to express their displeasure because of their lies. Nothing even comes out of them to better the lives of Zambians.

Government, at any given level can be treated as a typical example of a natural monopoly. And like any other unchecked private monopoly, government and by extension governance, can produce sub-optimal units of public good in which it has comparative advantage. Thus, we see the substandard public service that our government has been rendering to Zambians without care. Nothing is done right because they have no competition, and most instructively, because they are never held accountable by the public. In fact, we seem to urge them to perform worse each time. Furthermore, this irresponsible, corrupt mode of governance is put even more under pressure as the scale of the global financial crisis becomes clearer, and its repercussions are felt in every corner of the world, and the extent to which entire societies will suffer will depend partly on the quality of their governance systems. Those countries with governments that enjoy the respect and confidence of their people are likely to weather the stresses more easily than countries where politicians are viewed with disdain, Zambia being one of the latter.

We suspect that Zambia will be hard hit by the crisis, for several reasons. The main one is that Zambia has not risen to the challenge of responsible governance by developing economies based on productive industries and other economic sectors. Our economy and politics have been largely based on a platform of monumental and unchecked official production and inefficient bureaucracy and other result vices that accompany such. Zambia's economy is headed to a crash currently, and we find ourselves particularly weak and vulnerable, given our lack of economic and financial sovereignty. This is not a problem we can blame on anyone else, other than ourselves. It is an economic management problem at one level, but deep down it is failure of political governance. Not surprisingly, the politics of our time in Zambia does not seem to have answers to this problem either.

This is the moment of potentially historic change for courageous and honest leaders who will stand up and tell other political leaders and Zambians the truth about their failures, and suggest a more rational path to national revival and wellbeing. The current global crisis will hurt, but what will hurt more is to respond to it with the same combination of technical incompetence and political irresponsibility that has guided Zambian national development for sometime now.

But our clueless and inept leaders do not care or seem to understand that they are steering the country towards anarchy and mayhem. In fact, they are not even steering at all, because they are busy squabbling over the looting of the treasury, thereby leaving the ship rudderless. This is how best we can view it. Just to take a look at what happens every day at the National Assembly. Our 'elected' representatives wake up in the morning, go to the assembly, sit down, hurl abuses at each other, shout 'hear, hear', then collect their ridiculous sums of money at the end of the day. That is their business done for the day. That explains why in Zambia, politics is a " do-or-die" business. Those who are there, mainly as a result of election malpractices and manipulation never want to leave while those who are still out and want to get there will do anything to get there.

But where do all these live the ordinary Zambian who is simply asking for basic facilities to enable him or her survive in the world? It is really grim prospects for them. There seems to be no hope. And this is why we said that the high cost of governance in Zambia, mainly because of corruption and inept management practices, is not only costing us an arm and a leg but it's costing us our lives as well.

So where is the solution? Our suggestions are not new. They are common sense and everybody knows this is what should be done. In fact, our politicians are aware of what should be done; only they do not want to do it, because it may not be worth their while, or it may simply be that they do not know how to do it.

Frugality and better governance are good places to start. However, with our unabated and unchecked corruption, we don't have a hope in hell. We do not need to be told that working and living in the Zambian bureaucracy long enough and one realises the level of waste, ineffective spending, corruption, lack of transparency and impracticality of the modus operandi. There is no doubt that our bureaucracy is made up of talented, well-meaning and visionary leaders who need to tone down on their ceremonies, rhetoric, workshops, seminars, conferences and other official trips and foreign jamborees, excessive publicity and propaganda campaigns and focus on tapping best practices and ingraining their departments with a way of planning and thinking to optimise each kwacha of state revenue and start thinking less of their own pockets, but of the people they are supposed to serve.

There is urgent need for a comprehensive governance reform to cut down the bloated cost of governance, which has starved essential welfare projects of funds. We are of the opinion that the most important thing is that government must be made unattractive to people who think getting into government is a means of making money. When people know that being in government, either as a politician or as a civil servant is not a lucrative way to make easy money, then we will be able to separate the maize or the grain from the chaff. We will then know that those who are in government really do want to serve. It used to be like this a long time ago under Dr Kenneth Kaunda's leadership. Second, the salaries and allowances of public office holders must be drastically slashed. Third, the bloated civil services and political bureaucracy must be reduced and the number of political jobbers called aides, special advisers, special assistants and so on and so forth must be pruned to the minimum possible.

All these may sound utopian and overly optimistic, given the prevailing state of the country, but all we need is a few good men and women to start it. It is not impossible to turn things around even in the seemingly almost hopeless situation that we have found ourselves.

One thing for sure, Zambia cannot afford to spend up to 50 per cent of its budget oiling the wheels of corruption in the form of useless, unproductive, greedy public office holders. It is outrageous and unsustainable. It is robbery. It is a waste of resources. It is now patently obvious that Zambians have to make the initiatives themselves, in any way, to correct this system of wasteful and retrogressive governance, because the ones at the helm of affairs are unconcerned. Let the truth be said always.

Labels: IMPEACHMENT, RUPIAH BANDA, SALARIES

posted by MrK @ 4:13 AM