The biggest story of the post 2016 elections
Vote counting at St Marys School during 2016 elections.
By Kellys Kaunda
For me, the biggest story of the post 2016 elections is the economic recovery program. Every time I pick a newspaper, I listen to news bulletins or watch news and other television programs; I am and will be looking for stories that speak to this theme. How the media reports this theme will indicate the extent to which they appreciate what is important in our nation today and the major struggle that we all need to focus on.
What are we or ought to be recovering from? We are supposed to be recovering from an economy that has snapped from its hinges following five years of unprecedented expenditure on capital projects threatening to collapse the whole edifice. Our national purse was bursting at the seams as we exerted so much pressure on it paying for one capital project after another.
The President admitted this fact indirectly in his address to parliament recently when he said only economically viable roads would be spent on while others will have to wait. Two forms of rationale – a political or economic rationale, influence the choice of capital projects. Clearly, some projects have been informed by political rationale because their economic value cannot be identified.
Why should PF be admitting this fact now? The answer lies in the political cycle that dominates the life of any government in power. The first five years is normally a populist one where politicians want to put up projects that an ordinary citizen can see and feel thereby making it easy to retain power at the next ballot date. Once this is crossed, it’s time to get down to real business and get realistic. Whether a nation could recover or not depends on the extent to which the damage had been down to the fundamentals that hold an economy together. Do we know for sure the extent the damage was done? At this point, this information is not readily available to members of the public. Instead, we are being told of recovery efforts without telling us how sick we are.
Herein lies a challenge to the media – do you have what it takes to independently establish the extent of our economy’s ills, what are we expected to suffer from, for how long, what medicines are we being given, and how competent are the physicians? The President told the nation that Permanent Secretaries are now on performance-based contracts. This is an attempt to ensure the frontline “soldiers” in the work of recovery do not have a jolly ride. I have also noticed that the Deputy to the Secretary to Cabinet brings to the public service technical skills relevant to the job at hand. This is all encouraging but, like the old saying goes, the devil is in the detail.
At Cabinet level, the majority are old faces making one wonder what quality difference they are expected to bring to a new term with new challenges. Beyond the exhortation to parliament, is there any training or orientation the ministers will be undergoing so that they are rejuvenated for the new challenges? Perhaps the President should consider this. It will also be interesting to see what contribution the new constitutional provision of executive mayors brings to relieving the nation of the stress related to the economic recovery we are embarking upon.