Do not call Zambia a poor country, call it a heavily exploited underdeveloped rich country.
By Professor Munyonzwe Hamalengwa
DO not call Zambia a poor country, it is not. Call it a rich but heavily exploited underdeveloped country. How do you call a country poor when statistics that are banded about indicate that between 2021 and 2023, over US$3 billion were illicitly externalised to Asian countries and much more than that left Zambia for western countries via tax concessions, tax evasions and transfer pricing by multinational corporations, and debt servicing on current and previous borrowings? Poor countries can’t afford such bleeding but Zambia, a rich country in resources can afford this.
Nomenclature to describe a country matter. The World Bank calls you poor, you clamour and accept the tag. You begin to fight the tag of being poor instead of fighting to get out of what you really are: a rich exploited underdeveloped country. Strategies of fighting these labels are different. The outcome is different. We have heard the song which is in fact true that Zambia is very rich in precious and other mineral resources, abundant tourist resources, some of the world’s best rich soils and excellent liveable climates on earth. We are not poor. We are simply exploited and underdeveloped.
Let’s take a longer route to put all the above assertions into context and along the way, the causes of Zambia’s claimed poverty and possible solutions will be clearly or implicitly apparent. First fact you must know is that Zambia was first incorporated into the world’s economy as a company state. The British South Africa Company (BSA Company) first ruled Zambia as property to supply minerals to the empire. Despite the permutations , the country has gone through economically and politically since 1889, consider whether Zambia as of 1964 when it obtained its political independence has truly shed its original economic status as a company property. Zambia’s economic engine is based on mining and who owns the mines? Are the profits from the mining sector ploughed right back into Zambia’s development? Whoever owns the mines decides where the profits go, isn’t it?
Let’s leave Zambia for a second and talk about oil resources in the middle east. If you visited the middle east in the early seventies, you would have noticed that most of it was pure desert, very little urban development and hardly any infrastructure. The evidence of how the Middle East looked like up to the 1970s is available in many books, photos on YouTube or travel guides you buy in middle east airport lounges. Think of the middle east countries you now see. The United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and others have completely transformed from deserts to oases in half a century. Zambia has been independent since 1964, over half a century ago just like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and other countries. When you dig deep down into the causes of the differences in the rate of development between the Middle Eastern countries in general and Zambia, it boils down to three major factors: (1) the control of the countries resources,(2);the use to which those resources have been put to, and (3) the character of the leaderships in the countries. Because of limited space, I cannot expound on these points but President Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore has written several books on this. How he transformed his country from third world status to first world status is discussed at length and from which Zambia can learn. There are also many books on the transformation of the middle east. These countries grabbed back their resources from the foreign companies that owned them and put the resources at the disposal of their people. The leadership despite being theocratic or dictatorial put the resources at the disposal of their people. The character of the leadership really matters regardless of the politics of the country. Do leaders want their resources to be put at the disposal of their people? Infrastructural development is dependent on how farsighted the leadership is. Middle eastern leaders or those of Singapore or Malaysia or Indonesia are not socialist but they put their resources at the disposal of the people. On the other hand , the leaderships of China, the historical Soviet Union and Cuba claimed to be socialist who put the resources of their countries at the disposal of the people. Leadership no matter what its ideology is, matters in terms of what it does with its resources. What has been the character of Zambian leadership? Who controls our resources? Are we still a company state? How have we used our resources? These are empirical and researchable questions. Did we grab our resources back? How did other countries climb out of poverty? Up to the 70s, Middle Eastern countries despite their rich oil resources were referred to as poor countries despite their rich oil resources just like Zambia is referred to now. Can Zambia learn anything from the ME?
Enough talking about the Middle East and Singapore and Malaysia. Let’s talk about countries in Africa closer to home. If you have never travelled outside Zambia, you can never really know how Zambia has remained generally stagnant since 1964 in terms of infrastructural and urban development in comparison to many countries in Africa, let alone the rest of the world. First thing you notice when you leave Zambia and arrive in other countries are the road networks. Other countries have double or more lane ways each way from the airport to the city centre. In Lusaka it is one lane each way from the airport to the roundabout on Great East Road. Go to Harare, Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg, Dar-es -Salaam, Cairo, Accra, Kigali, Addis Ababa and see for yourself what I mean. We will leave alone the one-way lane each way going into Windhoek from the airport because Namibia has developed it’s urban core and other infrastructure in 30 years of independence than Zambia has done in 60 years of its independence. What is truly a voluminous statement of Zambia’s state of underdevelopment is that after 60 years of independence, we still have a mainly one lane each way from Livingstone, the country’s main tourist attraction through the Capital City of Lusaka all the way to the Copperbelt and beyond as well as branching through to Malawi and Tanzania, to Namibia and Angola. One lane each way roads. I have used the word, mainly not all the way. We have two lanes each way from Lusaka to Chilanga and from Lusaka to Kabangwe roundabout. Now go to Tanzania, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and other countries. Here you can throw in other countries like Qatar, UAE, Singapore, Cuba, Brazil, Jamaica, and others. The question will be: what has Zambia been doing in 60 years? Even the new roads that we have recently built like 70/70 Road from Linda Roundabout to the six miles roundabout it is one lane way each way even when it is known or should have been known that population increases, the number of vehicles will increase and traffic will be a nightmare. The Ring road through Chalala to Kafue road is one lane way each way. What kind of city planning leadership do we have in Zambia? Most of these roads including the new ones don’t have proper sidewalk pavements for civilians to walk on unobstructed by traffic. These roads are still built like colonial days when only white settlers had cars and pedestrians were Africans and needed no consideration and therefore there was no need for sidewalks. The companies who build these roads are foreign companies but in their countries ,they build proper sidewalks. In their countries these companies also build side road drainages that are covered by concrete all the way to prevent littering and infestation of mosquitoes. Because these drainages are covered, they are either part of the sidewalks or roadways. Covered drainages serve useful purposes. Our leaders who have travelled the world have seen them and I have seen them. You don’t find open drainages in India, China, Germany and other countries from which the road construction companies come from. I am particular about drainages because they contribute to flooding, malaria, cholera and other diseases and they are unsightly when you look at the garbage in them.
What has Zambia been up to in 60 years in terms of urban building? In the same frame of time examine the urban buildings that have sprung up in Dar- es -Salaam, Arusha, Harare, Nairobi, Lagos, Windhoek, Cairo, Accra, Kigali and so on and Zambia is put to shame. I lived in Tanzania in the mid -seventies and I can compare what was there then and what is there now. I have visited Nairobi, Lagos, Harare, Cairo, Windhoek, Addis Ababa and other cities a number of times and they have fundamentally changed since the 1970s while Zambian cities have barely grown except the proliferation of malls and housing for the rich away from the urban areas. There are also two -lane ways in some neighborhoods where the rich live. Some important infrastructure has broken down, for example the University of Zambia, Lusaka Central Police Headquarters, satellite police stations, the Post office, the Lusaka Central Business District, the University Teaching Hospital (UTH). This has nothing to do with this or that regime, it is an accumulation of leadership crises since 1964.
And Zambia is not a poor country. Every year, billions of dollars are externalised, meaning it is not a problem of lack of resources or money. It is a matter of who controls the resources, how the resources are deployed and most important the character and calculus of Zambian leadership of a 60 -year span has performed. Lee Kuan Yew’s books spell it all out. How the United Arab Emirates, China, Singapore, Qatar, Malaysia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia and others have developed offer poignant lessons for Zambia. Zambia is not a poor country; it is simply an exploited underdeveloped rich country. I will apply in the High court of Zambia for an injunction to stop the reference to Zambia as a poor country. Strategies of how to get out of Zambia’s predicament is predicated on whether you are fighting to get out of the “poor” condition or out of “exploitation”. Zambia is not poor. What you are fighting to get out of, makes a world of difference. And leadership matters, leadership of the past, present and future.
Declaration: I became more acutely aware of the subject matters of this article when I and Professor Indhu Rajagopal were asked to develop and teach a course on “Urban Economies” at York University, Toronto, Canada in the 1980s. The awareness of the subject matters of this article were further enhanced by my travels to and observations in some of the countries mentioned here and others not mentioned here.
