DISTORTED LIBERALISATION

By November 1991 Zambia had 126 school and college students per 100,000 population and the literacy rate was below 70%.
There was one medical doctor for every 5,000 Zambians. According to statistics recorded then, there were 32 beds for every ten thousand patients. The infant mortality rate was 127 deaths per 1000 children under the age of 5. The backbone of housing, transportation and telecom was dilapidated, at best.
These statistics do not even mention that Zambia had accumulated USD 7.8 billion of debt without a revenue structure in place to repay. The numbers also ignore the total absence of economic, social and political freedoms; encompassing freedom of press, of association, let alone basic human rights hitherto.
Instead, the political distortion of liberalisation has manufactured an illusion that suggests that a nation of shared values and prosperity existed before 1991.
That with democracy came unrepentant corruption. Yet, in a political system that repressed shared resources or public accountability, no one dares ask question how the nation degenerated to a point of meriting a revolutionary call regime change which ended the dictatorship. Nobody asks how resources were utilized, there is merely assumptions that there was accountability; even when people were arrested for demanding transparency.
Little wonder how the bastion of hope was relegated to be a nation of hardships with a serious absence of basic commodities and no economic solution to alleviate the levels of poverty the citizens were grappling with.
Nonetheless, the new mis-logic proffers a subtle conclusion that liberalisation must be blamed for all remnants of social strife Zambia has been going through.
To ask how the country got to those deplorable levels is normal, but a better study is providing a summation of how these challenges were resolved. I will provide a short theoretical basis and revert to policies that shaped modern Zambia.
Within the school of capitalism is a concept of ideational liberalism; or what Friedrich List called mental capital. Both concepts essentially ascribe to creating states responsive to social groups and their contribution to commerce and state function.  
To avoid becoming overly theoretical, these notions merely ascribe to the inclusion of multiple societal groups in the function of state.
As a first practical example, liberalisation allowed the private ownership of educational institutions without the head of state being the chancellor of all universities. According to the Ministry of Education’s Education Statistics Bulletin 2020 published in August 2022, there continues to be an increase in primary and secondary schools to 9,441 and 1,290 respectively. The total number of students reached over 4million.
At tertiary level, total students in public institutions reached 22 753 and 13,425 in private institutions. Compare this with 126 school and college students per 100,000 in 1991 and an adult literacy rate of 83% for females and 91% for males by 2018 according to world bank statistics.
The same approach liberalised the health sector so that private ownership of health institutions was allowed.
The real progress is seen by how many people now have access to (universal) health care and services. Although the doctor patient ratio is not oer international standard, it is due to population growth and outpacing health infrastructure.
Part of the illusion from the second republic was that free education and free health worked when the reality was that there was a lack of medicines and medical equipment in hospitals in addition to shortage of bedspace.
The introduction of user fees created a mandatory revenue base for government health facilities, a practice that continues to this day. Furthermore, because health services required to be paid for created a private insurance sector which complimented the growth of the banking and financial services sector.
Many other sectors underwent deregulation or liberalisation which guaranteed and protected private citizens participation in the economy, in politics and social advancement.
The decentralisation, which some have accused as being chaotic or ad hoc effectively created an economy able to trade with neighbours and far-flung trading partners. That first 10 years of liberalisation transformed Zambia’s diplomatic relationships from political – and centered on a single individual, to economic diplomacy focused on many a business partner.
Even in mining, which is often the case of “political mileage” led lamentation, indigenous citizens were granted mining licenses for the first time while dismantling the mines to avoid a wholesale sell-off of the entire resource base that would have led to the sector being dominated by few foreign players.
It therefore goes without saying that liberalization has had a bigger impact on the nations economic landscape and requires a leadership that will further build on that to enhance and indigenization of all the factors of production in order to lay a foundation for establishing indigenous millionaires with a strong desire to not just reinvest in Zambia but also ensure that their profits are retained within Zambian banks to allow for an enhance multiplier effect and avoid capital flight that has been rampant in situations were factors of production are helps in the hands of foreigners.
Those 10 years reduced the burden of national debt and introduced society into national affairs, setting the people onto a path of freedom enjoyed to this day.