Talking Corruption

I appeared earlier today on Diaspora Voice to discuss the state of corruption in Zambia and what interviews are necessary to successfully defeat the leviathan. You can listen to the show here. This is part of a series of monthly discussions on Diaspora Voice where I plan to discuss some of the complex issues we have discussing on Zambian Economist. The shows are hosted by James Mwape and I will be appearing on the first Saturday of each month. The next show will be on "The Copper Curse".

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One Party Participatory Democracy

It is a very long time since an opposition party in Southern Africa managed to remove a seating political party from power. Infact for some countries like Botswana it remains a pipe dream. That story continued last week when Frelimo crushed Renamo in Mozambique elections. A result the legendary Alfonso Dlakhama is not taking lightly.

We have previously touched on this issue - see Are opposition political parties doomed in Africa?

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Good Argument (Lameck Mangani)

“The nation did not get a good deal from the Taskforce. A lot of money was spent on private lawyers. The facts on the expenditure and recoveries speak for themselves,”

Home Affairs Minister Lameck Mangani correctly identifying the fundamental problem with the Task Force. This essentially borrows the argument, I made a while back that the Task Force on Corruption was very much poor value for money :

It is true that there's no price that we can put on rule of law and justice in general. But we have to remember that the Task Force was not designed to achive these things, as that is the task for our entire Justice System. The Task Force was created to investigate and help recover the plunder of President Chiluba's government. Many of us were led to believe that Chiluba stole billions of dollars from Zambian coffers. Not even 1% of that has been recovered. I believe a cost benefit analysis would reveal that it has negative net present value. The quantified cost of running the task force far outweigh the benefits. That is even before we consider the gross inefficiencies (duplication of tasks with other law enforcement agencies). If GRZ wants an economic assessment of the Task Force, we are available to advise on how such an exercise can be done. Cheaper than RP Capital :)

A friend replied privately and assured me that the Task Force was all funded by donors so poor value for money was irrelevant. Apparently, his view was that we can waste donor aid because it was not "our money". I am being harsh, what he was actually trying to tell me was that the appraisal had to be done from the "Zambian perspective" not the "world perspective". I assured him that I was indeed doing the "theoretical appraisal" from the Zambian perspective, but crucially unlike him, I fully believed the Task Force was being bankrolled by GRZ. I had no proof, until George Kunda revealed last week, donors stopped funding it a long time ago. Mr Mangani's assessment adds further weight to the facts. It was Zambian tax payers money that bankrolled the Task Force and appear to have led to more corruption.

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The financial cost of corruption..

A key challenge of tackling public theft in Zambia is simply understanding its scale. The general public certainly has a sense of where public money has been stolen, but it appears they are missing key information on the extent of corruption. In practice there remains significant vacuum of information on the extent of such theft since Zambia became independent in 1964. There’s no universal agreement or public record of how much public money has been stolen or misappropriated since independence. The most authoritative estimate to date was undertaken by Djokotoe & Chama (2007), which puts an annual loss of around K350bn through either misappropriation, theft of extreme mismanagement.

But that figure relies solely on the information gleaned from the many Auditor General's reports between 1984 and 2004. The actual losses to the State of Zambia are likely to be much larger because the Auditor General is incapable of auditing every institution annually, so many losses remain undisclosed. More importantly, these figure would exclude grand theft ("ZAMTROP"). We should therefore treat the K350bn figure as a minimum annual cost. There's a PHd subject lurking here somewhere for a bright (and very brave) Zambian student - we need new estimates!

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Irrational Fear

There are many good reasons for not having the freedom of information bill at the moment, but this is not one of them :

Vice president George Kunda says the freedom of information bill has been withdrawn from parliament. Kunda said in parliament that the bill can not be made into law now because some Zambian journalists will use it to sell the country. Kunda said some Zambian journalists are unpatriotic and irresponsible and therefore passing the Freedom of Information bill into law will only be done later. He said the bill will be taken back to parliament ‘when it is in the best interest of Zambians.’

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Linking Zambia (Cecily's Fund)

A wonderful UK registered charity that is making it possible for Zambian orphans and other impoverished children to go to school. Cecily's Fund works closely with Zambian partner organisations, Hodi, CHEP andBwafwano to:

• Enable more than 9,500 children who have been orphaned or made vulnerable because of AIDS to go to primary and secondary school, with the same uniforms and equipment as other children, so they are not stigmatised by their situation.

• Offer training to school-leavers each year as peer health educators, teaching other children how to stay healthy and avoid HIV
  

• Offer school-leavers support to train as teachers, which equips them for a secure, government paid job. It also helps to replace some of the thousands of teachers that have been lost to AIDS in Zambia.

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