Delegation Meets With Members of Zambia Parliament

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Today, we had the opportunity to meet with several Zambian Members of Parliament.

Hon. Kambwiwi Chisamba, MP, told us, “Thanks to debt relief, we have been able to rehabilitate our schools and our hospitals. But we have made many sacrifices and we still have a long way to go.”

One of the problems we had heard about in Siavonga, Mr. Chisamaba affirmed for us: “Because of benchmarks by the IMF, we are not able to pay our nurses good enough salaries. They are going to places like Australia.”

We learned from our friends at Jubilee Zambia that the IMF is requiring Zambia to keep its public sector wage bill (wages for teachers, doctors, nurses, etc) to below 8 percent of GDP. The following paragraph is paragraph 8, Section II Medium-term adjustment strategy, from the IMF's "Memorandum of Economic & Finance Policies" for Zambia, released in 1999. The 5 percent at the end was later changed to 8 percent:
However, an updated payroll analysis suggests that such a sharp reduction in the public service cannot be realized without reducing employment in education and health care. With the assistance of the World Bank, we are carrying out more detailed work to determine the optimal size of the civil service in the medium term.

Oxfam, a member of Jubilee USA Network, assessed how IFI conditionalities hurt Zambia's education and health care systems in September 2004.

The Hon. Jacob Brighton Chongo, another Member of Parliament, told us, “When we are able to pay our teachers more, they will be more motivated. We want the government to use the proceeds from debt relief to increase wages of civil service employees like teachers and nurses. If not, we are afraid the conditions will negate the good impacts of debt relief.

Finally. Hon. Michael Andrew Nyrende talked about the need to place parliamentary scrutiny in the process of contracting new loans to avoid an outbreak of a new debt crisis. “We want a model as Members of Parliament to be able to scrutinize new loans. Let’s not make the same mistakes again.”

--post by Neil Watkins