GOVERNMENT has the responsibility to deliver value to citizens and ensure that as a nation, we gain the full benefits of the resources the country is endowed with, otherwise we are nothing but a laughing stock whose resources will eventually be a source of national shame than pride.
This truth confronts and troubles all administrations, but recently an understanding of value is missing in the national discourse of resource ownership. It appears vantage points are taking precedence over logic and historical facts.
A national asset or nationalised asset that does not contribute to the economy so that basic commodities are absent in the country is not worth defending.
The point of a national asset is to derive monetary and economic or financial value that can directly impact the citizens tangibly. As such, nationalisation, when citizens do not know the value of the asset in government hands, or how its resources are distributed is not worth defending because it adds no real value either as revenue or economic progress.
Similarly, a privatised asset whose contribution to the country is to make national statistics look impressive without adding value to the citizens either through ownership of those privatised assets or via tax contribution is equally delusional.
Chinese, American or European philosophies and their preferences should not dictate how we review our own capabilities.
Worse still, it is self-effacing, if in the process of not understanding economic distribution of national assets we negate the contributions of those who sacrificed to open our eyes to the importance of value.
In the current scenario, privatisation has been demonised and mischaracterised as a creation of the capitalist west in their bid to deny citizens their right to benefiting from national assets such as mines.
The outturn of the earlier privatisation of the 1990s is portrayed in some quarters as robbery than economic emancipation. Shockingly, however, without the same privatisation, the value of the mines and their potential contribution would remain hidden and fronted only as a matter of national pride.
Even the Zambia Revenue Authority (ZRA) was created during this period of liberalisation to gain maximum revenue from these assets and let citizens know how much was earned.
It is true that liberalisation empowered the country’s entire social system through transferring capital from government to private local and foreign hands.
It is also true that this entailed creating efficiencies at central and local government. Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) remain a difficult memory for most Zambians that remember that time. For a country with no income, no middle class or private enterprise hitherto, the strain was worsened and blame was directed to those who painfully sought solutions.
What is lost in this crowded discourse is that Zambia understood the value of creating an efficient economy that was able to trade globally and become a thriving economy in the 1990s and beyond.
It was Zambia that led the go-east policy which culminated in opening the first Bank of China (BoC) in Africa, or outside China in 1997. China’s political assistance and aid to Zambia was always available.
But an era of economic emancipation required economic and financial growth which would not be driven by stringent IMF loans and conditionalities. On a comparative basis, China gave more money for longer periods than the IMF.
If those patriots of liberalisation did not tap into China’s financial power, they would have been less than responsible. Alas, they provided the future a template for alternative financial options.
But it remains the responsibility of the borrower to obtain funds responsibly and apply the funds with intelligent foresight. What has also been misunderstood is that the political independence of 1964 was limited only to the ruling party and no one else.
It is the economic independence of 1991 that created social and economic emancipation that created political freedom. The IMF-China nexus of the 1990s should not be misused to derail the essential question of transferring the value of the economy to citizens.
If nationalisation was a system that cared for citizens, it would have found economic solutions for those citizens. If privatisation is to retain some integrity, the options and opportunities should be in consultation with citizens – via their representatives, as democracy deems.
What is essential and most critical in all this is value. That is what belied the struggle for democracy in the late 1980s until 1991 when democracy and the value of the citizen won.
It does not matter the philosophy; the idea is to transfer value to the local economy and the citizens for their social economic progress.
While we debate who is better for us or who is stealing our resources with a lopsided misrepresentation of history, other nations are moving on. In fact, China already owns significant stake in Australia’s energy sector among the three top players that supply more than 70 percent of small electricity customers and more than 80 percent of small gas customers. So, they lose nothing. We, on the other hand have a responsibility to deliver value to our citizens.
