By MUBANGA LUCHEMBE
PREDICTABLY more than ever before, we live in a country of passing enthusiasm and panic. Waves of hope or fear, prompted by some seemingly significant post-regime change event, pass around the nation like local tsunamis.
But this is a time for keeping feet planted firmly on the ground. It is time to pay less attention to what is happening on the surface and more to what light solid evidence and mature analysis can shed on any matter of current concern. Never has this been more relevant than right now in Zambia.
It is one of the benefits of modern information technology that post-regime change events can be reported and reactions shared almost instantly, and on a massive scale. Recent events in the country illustrate this new ‘information power’ in obvious ways. But there is a less welcome aspect which has not been commented upon enough. It is now much easier for large masses of people to convince each other that the nation has suddenly changed, for better or worse, in some fundamental and irreversible way.
Many observers find this worrying in the context of how ordinary Zambian citizens think about politics and socio-economic development. They have in mind Energy Minister Peter Kapala’s decision to place Zambia’s sole Indeni Petroleum Refinery on care and maintenance a situation that would see some employees retrenched. In his statement, he explained that the other employees would be reassigned to manage fuel storage depots with TAZAMA Petroleum Products Limited. He also disclosed that government had begun the process of reforming the petroleum subsector.
Worth noting though, this decision resonates with the UPND’s manifesto where it promised that it would restructure the fuel supply chain so as to achieve least-cost pricing whilst ensuring stable supply of petroleum products. The Energy Minister explained that the reforms were aimed at ensuring that there was adequate, reliable and affordable supply of petroleum products in the country. Adding that, government also intended to implement under transportation, the reconfiguring of the pipeline to enable the pumping of Low Sulphur Gasoil (LSG- Diesel) through the TAZAMA pipelines as one of the reforms.
Furthermore, he explained that products such as Petrol, Jet A1, Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), Kerosene and Heavy Fuel Oil (HFO) would be transported by road as they would no longer be produced by Indeni Petroleum Refinery. But in stark contrast to this, common sense suggests use of TAZARA railway line in the northern corridor which links the country with the port of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and Zambia Railways in the southern corridor through the ports of Durban and Port Elizabeth in South Africa and Beira in Mozambique.
Meanwhile, energy experts have advised government to set up an independent technical task force to assess the viability of converting the 53-year old 1,710km TAZAMA pipeline from transporting comingled-crude oil to transporting refined fuel. These experts have been analyzing evidence on what forms of politics and restructured fuel supply chain that would really work for socio-economic development in Zambia.
Despite the increasing countrywide demand of refined fuel supply, there has never been increasing activity in the transportation of refined fuel by rail, which can provide cost-effective rates, flexibility and quick transportation throughout the country. TAZARA and Zambia Railways could offer shippers cheaper contracts than pipelines and other transportation methods, making them a more secure and reliable method of refined fuel transportation.
The experts’ findings have definite implications for the future course of political and socio-economic development in the country. However, it is going to be difficult to get a hearing so long as the general state of opinion continues to lurch from radical pessimism to overblown optimism in response to the latest statistics or post-regime change event. Clearly though, Zambia’s petroleum sector had been marred with a lot of inefficiencies, which had increased the cost of petroleum products.
Estimates at the Ministry of Finance indicate that Zambia has been spending more than US$20m per month on fuel subsidies due to inefficiencies in the procurement chain. Zambia’s newly-elected government is in talks with the IMF for a lending programme. It recently pledged to slash its budget deficit and curb borrowing in a bid to secure that support, and Finance Minister Situmbeko Musokotwane explained that reducing spending on politically-sensitive subsidies, such as on electricity, fuel and farming, was likely to be one of the IMF’s key demands.
Currently, Zambia is the focus of democratic enthusiasm and elevated expectations thanks to the election of President Hakainde Hichilema in what are said to have been the country’s most peaceful and cleanest elections ever. Yet, Zambian citizens should be more concerned about whether they have the kind of democracy that will work for their socio-economic development. The formal processes of democracy – elections and parliament – do not naturally produce the kind of political leadership needed to drive socio-economic development. They tend in fact, to generate a short-term mindset among politicians and voters alike, which is disastrous for the quality of policy.
The most important source of this short-termism in our country is ‘winner-takes-all’ politics. In our ethnically divided society, this sort of democracy typically leads to at least one major group being excluded from any access to the benefits of office. Zambia faces poor prospects unless it can establish some sort of government co-option of all major social forces – especially the main ethnic or regional leaderships.
Beneath the detail of the electoral rules, it needs political settlement providing some firm guarantees of non-exclusion from power to all major players. Without this, leading politicians will never have the necessary confidence to stake their careers on promoting the long-term transformation our country needs, like dealing with Indeni Petroleum Refinery. There is firm evidence behind this basic, but perhaps not entirely obvious point, but it is not widely appreciated. One reason is that the current wave of enthusiasm for democracy, like the wave of optimism about Zambia’s economy, is tending to sweep all before it, including the US$5bn Angola-Zambia oil pipeline project.
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