Dear Editor,
ONE of the ultimate achievements that we would all want to see in Zambia slightly after the August 12 general elections is the aspect of revitalisation and reformation of the Zambian’ economic structure.
As citizens, we need to embark on an economic reform strategy programme to give comfort on many fundamentals that we are seeing failing to make up and also to help in resuscitating from the current shaped models, to one that should be a dynamic model which needs to balance up the actors within the economic wheels so that most of our commercial activities, are certainly undertaken with much vigour and far-reaching impact to spur growth and attain the much needed economic stability, which should first of all be triggered based on the attractive policy package deal.
As a nation, we are very much capable of doing some great things, and we need to push our numbers on the GDP to a relatively unprecedented level, a record that should be set for a good tone on record especially if we reflect in the past where our GDP ratios were pretty good and our core inflation was within the policy corridor.
We all know that the Kwacha has been set on a floating model of operation, though currently faced with a less supply factor into the local market which is greatly affecting the trading patterns.
I recommend that the next set of government should come in, with a heavily front-loaded programme, that would need to include a reduction of the public workforce to start shifting the burden to private investment so that growth towards vision 2030 can easily be achieved. There is a need to strongly touch on fiscal, structural and legal reforms.
A debt sustainability programme should out rightly be implemented with the backing of IMF stand-by arrangements with the involvements of other multilateral partners, though a strong emphasis should closely look at restructuring of local content policy to allow more of local productions and citizen participations.
Following the current trend, Zambia needs some good policy reforms to ensure that we truly achieve full macro-stabilisation on a positive score mark, especially if you reflected in just the few past months where we have seen falling interest payments.
However, we also need to devise a dynamic strategy to suit changing dimensions of the Zambian economic environment which can help to offer some reduction in the inflation movement levels.
We should also pursue some considerable modalities to help cause positive effect towards registering appreciation levels in the exchange rates. Allow me to state that Zambia’s inflation is foreign rate based and the policy rate is having less impact.
Our plea going forward is that we need to work with a robust fiscal and monetary policy framework, which should be strongly tied up to a good policy transmission strategy.
KELVIN CHISANGA.
