Maravi

Incessant corruption is aggravating poverty

Incessant corruption is aggravating poverty
Mon 03 Jan. 2011, 03:59 CAT

THE concerns that donors to our country have continued to raise about accountability over the use of public funds need to be taken very seriously by those in government.

As Reverend Pukuta Mwanza, the executive director of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, has correctly observed, the political leadership of this country needs to take the donors’ concerns about accountability seriously and not try to belittle them or play them down in any way. Donor aid is a good or positive thing. But it needs to be managed prudently. And if managed wisely, it can offer us possibilities of a much more rapid development. But we shouldn’t forget that aid has to be conditional.

We say this because when you help someone, a position is taken, and that position is taken on the basis of certain analyses of the loyalty and effectiveness of the leadership of the country you are helping. The assistance should be conditional; if not, we run the risk of it being turned into the opposite of what we want. And whatever its conditionalities, donor aid is today the lifeblood and clearly keeps hope alive for the great majority of our people who otherwise will have found themselves in extremely bad circumstances indeed.

But despite massive donor assistance to our country for over four decades, the great majority of our people live in abject poverty and on less than a dollar a day, with no access to education, healthcare, clean water and other basic services required in an organised society. The reason for this abnormality is because we are failing to account for the aid and show clearly what we have done with it.

When the political leadership of a country prioritises the value of life for its citizens, then there is a little chance to see the spectacle of emaciated children, some of them living on the street, and an impoverished population.

This dismal failure can be attributed to many factors such as our inability to take serious action to generate economic prosperity. Rather, our politicians in government and technocrats alike, have been scrambling to squeeze resources away from the poor.

And their failure to establish transparency and accountability over the use of public funds and other resources has been a sure recipe for inertia and is helping to perpetuate a system that prevents socio-economic development in our country. Clearly, the future of our people is ransomed by those who wield power. And because donor aid is based on bureaucracy and conditionalities, there’s little the ordinary citizen of this country can do to break this cycle of poverty.

As we have already pointed out, donor aid is a necessity for the poor people of our country, but it is often wasted on things that have no bearing on the lives of our people. Oftentimes, the inputs of the ordinary people are not sought; and when they are sought, it's just as a mere formality and is not taken into account or consideration.

Rather, it is the politicians in government and their hand-picked technocrats that take centre stage in the use of donor aid at the expense of the poor. Donor aid could be a catalyst for our socio-economic development. But not in the way it is being used. For it to be useful and effective, it has to be used in a fair and just manner, with due consideration to the needs and interests of the ordinary people, especially the poor. If this is not so, then the essence of donor aid becomes meaningless and counterproductive for the great majority of our people. Our politicians in government and their technocrats don’t seem to value the lives of their citizens, and it seems no matter the amount of aid, their typical inertia will always be pervasive.

They seem to shy away from constructive policies to generate national income and when they do, they normally do this in a corrupt way within their political strongholds, their tribal areas, ostracising others who do not belong to their league.

We cannot afford to be always on the receiving end. Those giving us aid must start to rethink – and most of them are already doing so – their approach towards how they assist us and the distribution of their aid. Rather than giving us their taxpayers’ money for which we show no positive results, they must start to put more effort in the way we account for this assistance. They must not hesitate to suspend such assistance if we fail to account for it, if we squander it.

Moreover, given our immense natural resources, after four decades of aid, we should have been firmly on our own. And it is us who today should be assisting other nations in the world that are not well-endowed with natural resources and are being consistently harassed by natural disasters. Here, we have in mind some poor nations in the Caribbean and Latin America, among others.

The sole cause of poverty in our country today is not lack of resources or even of donor aid. It is the incessant corruption among our political leaders, their technocrats and cronies. Look at the gigantic amount of money Frederick Chiluba, his technocrats and other cronies siphoned from the treasury of our country! And look at the corrupt way Rupiah Banda’s government has connived and manipulated things to allow Chiluba to go scot-free and keep his loot.

Rupiah’s government has corruptly refused to recover from Chiluba more than US$45 million they were granted by a London High Court judgment. And today Chiluba and his cronies are being given back the properties they had bought with stolen government money.

And this is being done with the assistance of corrupt technocrats in the justice institutions of the state. Our entire judicial process is today at the service of the corrupt, the politically well-connected plunderers. Sadly, these people are not interested in serving the poor, but in perpetuating their corrupt acts and dismissing any idea of meaningful socio-economic development, thus solidifying our country’s backwardness. A new approach that will make donor aid worthwhile in our country is urgently needed.

The reality is, there is still a big gulf between the poor and the rich in our country. The overwhelming majority of our people are still living without safe and clean drinking water, and no access to education and healthcare. With little or no accountability for donor aid, politicians and technocrats alike will continue to enrich themselves, while the status of ordinary citizens is being reduced disproportionately.

Even with the debt relief we received over the last decade, because of corruption, we are still grappling with the problem of how to provide good and adequate services to our people. An overwhelming number of Zambians lack jobs and there is little to boast of in terms of infrastructural development. As donor aid flows in, some politicians and technocrats are happy as it serves as an alternative to get wealth more quickly, and little is being done to generate national income to boost the economic life of our country.

They are not even interested in collecting meaningful taxes from the exploitation by trans-national corporations of our country’s natural resources, our mineral wealth. Look at their position on windfall taxes! The truth is they have corruptly sold these windfall taxes to the mining companies in exchange for personal favours of all sorts, including the funding of their election campaigns. This is what corruption can do to a country and to a people.

A poor or weak economy like ours needs an open and transparent system and effective government structures to enhance socio-economic development. And because the donors are there to provide budget support and project funding, there’s apathy among our politicians and their technocrats to be innovative and selfless.

In order to maximise the benefits of the aid they are giving us, donors must take serious action to make things work efficiently, effectively and in an orderly manner for the poor majority. The flow of aid should not be left in the hands of corrupt and unscrupulous politicians, their technocrats and cronies.

It needs to be monitored and scrutinised. There’s need for maximum accountability and transparency in the use of donor money. At all times, the citizens of this country should be made to know how much aid the donors have given us and how it has been applied. The citizens of this country need to be involved in ensuring accountability and transparency in the receipt and utilisation of donor aid.

Labels: CORRUPTION, PUKUTA MWANZA

posted by MrK @ 11:08 PM