The latest World Bank indicators on governance provides a new and exciting opportunity to assess how well President Mwanawasa has performed since he took charge towards the back end of 2001. We know that Africa as a whole has improved, especially in the area of corruption, but how far has Zambia progressed under Mwanawasa's leadership? In answering this question, my aim is to provide a short non partisan progressive appraisal of Mwanawasa's leadership in the area of governance over the last five years as indicated by the World Bank's newly publicly available data.
The table below from the World Bank database tells the story of Zambia since 2000 focusing on six governance indicators, as released today. The percentile rank indicates the percentage of countries worldwide that score below Zambia. So if we take a rank of 37 in 2006 on "voice and accountability", what it basically says is that 37% of countries scored worse than Zambia on this score and 63% were better than us. So this measure is very much a relative measure on how well we are doing with respective to other nations.
A quick scan of the table provides a rather interesting mix of the good, the bad and the ugly in President Mwanawasa's performance. The good news is that since Mwanawasa assumed command, political stability has drastically improved. In 2000 before Mwanawasa came to power, 68% of nations were more politically stable than Zambia. Fast forward to 2006 and only 44% can make that claim. The dramatic change over such short period cannot be by accident. Clearly Mwanawasa has done "something" to encourage greater political stability.
The increase in political stability is good news because foreign investors like political stability. It reduces the risk of their investment. From Zambia's perspective, it also encourages the right sort of foreign investment. If you can think of foreign investors as falling in two camps : goodies and the baddies. The baddies like war zones and corrupt regimes because that is where they do shady deals. The goodies are attracted to nice calm places and stay there for long. By Zambia being politically stable we have more chance of getting a greater pool of the good investors, which is a good thing in the long term because they tend to stick around and don't cut and run.
However, in crediting Mwanawasa with greater political stability, we must also recognise that democracy is naturally consolidating in Zambia and some of that undoubtedly is due to the current Government's openness to engage other political parties and encourage dialogue. But it may also be due to greater political patronage or what someone has called "politics of poverty". In other words Zambia is following the Botswana type of stability where electoral competition is eroded but the country remains at peace. Whether this is desirable or not is a matter of person opinion. Personally I favour greater checks and balances before electoral competition, although it is good for government to change hands once in a while in order to deepen the nation's democratic roots.
Another area where Mwanawasa has made progress is on the area of Government effectiveness. Admittedly Zambia is still performing much weaker compared to other nations. In 2006 nearly 75% of the rest of the world was performing better than Zambia. However, in terms of the position he inherited in 2000, Zambia has clearly improved. This should come as no surprise. Government effectiveness measures the "quality of public services, the quality of the civil service and the degree of independence from political pressures, the quality of policy formulation and implementation, and the credibility of the Government's commitment to such policies". Zambia's completion of HIPC point and subsequent debt relief coupled with the greater independence of the Central Bank provides sufficient evidence of the strides he has made in this area.
However the low ranking continues to highlight that Mwanawasa has yet to make the big strides especially in the area of public sector reform. I have previously argued that there's more to be done in this area focusing on a narrower Government, more independence of the civil service and the move towards participatory budgeting. Others have called for much more radical decentralisation aimed at streamlining Government and making it more effective.
I would add that crucially Government has to ensure that the Civil Service is an attractive area for the best talent to work. In the old days people longed to work in the Civil Service, but as the system became more and more corrupt the best talent were no longer attracted to the civil service and what we are left with is a poor system manned by not-the-best-talent Zambia has to offer. We need to reform and introduce greater competition within it and make it a first class service.
That's the good news. The bad news is that despite the supposed strident fight against corruption very little progress appears to have been made in this area since 2000. Indeed between the period 2000 and 2002 the situation appeared to have worsened with more countries performing better than Zambia in controlling corruption. It does appear that in the initial reign of President Mwanawasa, Zambia's fight against corruption stagnated or did not improve as much compared to other nations. Its therefore interesting to note, that between 2000 and 2006, Zambia only gained on 2% of other countries. That is to say it overtook 2% of other nations in the fight against corruption, of which all of these are nations are among the worst performers in terms of corruption. Its therefore fair to conclude that Zambia is not making the sort of progress we have been led to believe in this area since President Mwanawasa took over.
What could be the reason for this apparent stagnation? My initial view is that this is partly over emphasis on corruption fight itself. The media fixation with the Chiluba trial has probably meant the nation as a whole as lost focus on the fight against corruption. In the blog corruption wars, I argued that the key focus should be on institutional reform which would help put sufficient checks and balances in place, and not pointless witch hunts. There's no doubt that the lack of national wide institutional reform in form of a more robust constitution, lack of clear separation of responsibilities between agencies , and absence of more professional and independent civil service is to blame for our poor score in this area. These are the areas Zambia should be focusing on instead of spending money spent on never ending task forces, which panders to the media but achieves very little for the very poor in our rural areas.
That's the bad news. Unfortunately, what remains is rather ugly. In the three remaining governance indicators Zambia has actually got worse relative to other countries since President Mwanawasa came to power. When President Mwanawasa took over the nation "rule of law was a big theme". Zambia was going to be a country of laws rather than of men. The World Bank defines the rule of law indicator as "the extent to which agents have confidence and abide by the rules of society, and in particular the quality of contract enforcement, the police, and the courts, as well as the likelihood of crime and violence". In 2000 we were better than 34% of other countries, in 2006 we are 32% better than others countries. Zambia appears to be taking a backward step in this area since President Mwanawasa took over - at the very least we relatively walking backwards!
We also find evidence of poor performance in other areas. President Mwanawasa has not made progress in terms of giving people a greater voice ( voice and accountability) and also regulatory quality has declined relative to other nations . Both of theses area are well documented on this blog. In terms of "voice and responsibility" the Government's continuous hold over state media continues to limit people's freedom of expression. We recently heard that a radio station was threatened with being shut down for interviewing the Leader of the Opposition on one their shows. In an era in which we are trying to encourage openness and greater democratisation, there's no place for Government control of what people watch through their television sets and hear through their radios. This is especially the case in rural areas, where ZNBC remains the main source of information. Threatening to shut down radio stations is not acceptable.
Much also needs to be done to improve regulatory quality. In communications for example, we have argued for greater empowerment of the Communications Authority of Zambia and similar bodies. Much of that discussion can be found here.
So in light of this assessment, how well has Mwanawasa performed in the area of governance, since he took over? The answer is 2.5/6. Out of the 6 key indicators, Zambia has only made substantial strides on 2 - on the key area of corruption that has been celebrated by the World Bank today, Zambia has actually stayed the same relative to other countries. And on the questions of rule of law, regulatory quality and voice and accountability, Zambia has actually performed much worse than other nations since President Mwanawasa took over. The challenge now is for Zambians to realise that we are there yet. Yes we have made a few steps forward since President Mwanawasa took charge, but relative to the general performance of the rest of class we are certainly not scoring a "c" - we somewhere between a "d" or an "e". The good news is that with the new publicly available world bank data, we have no excuse for not holding Government to account in this important area of governance. Let us start today.