©The Elephant
IntroductionThe Structural Adjustment
Programmes (SAPs) arrived in Zambia in the late 1980s, but their full force hit
in 1991 under the new Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) government led
by Frederick Titus Jacob Chiluba. These Structural
Adjustment Programmes are economic policies that international organizations
like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank have promoted in
developing countries since the 1980s. They are considered a lifeline for economies that are burdened by debt. These
programmes have been seen to demand sweeping changes in countries where they
are adopted. The programmes aimed at helping nations
facing debt crises by requiring reforms such as cutting government spending,
privatizing state-owned companies, opening markets to foreign investment and
reducing subsidies on essential commodities such as food and fuel. In
theory, SAPs are meant to stabilize economies by reducing inflation and
encourage long-term growth. However, what is often overlooked is how these
reforms can harm human rights, particularly the rights to health, education, food, work and a
decent standard of living. Critics have long argued that in Zambia, these reforms
often come at a steep human cost. In this article,
we will explore these impacts with examples from across the country. By focusing on these stories,
we see how SAPs, while stabilizing budgets, deepened inequality and sparked
social unrest after their introduction. This has challenged Zambia’s
post-independence promise of dignity for all citizens and for this reason, a discussion
on these human costs deserves more attention
The
Hidden Costs: How SAPs Affect Economic and Social Rights
At
their core, SAPs focus on fixing economic imbalances, but they do so by
shrinking the role of government in providing basic services. This means less funding for public goods and public
services as well as any social protections afforded to citizens. This
leads to cuts in public funding for health care, education and social welfare
programmes. As a result of this, vulnerable groups such
as the poor, women and children continue to face greater hardships in their
communities. To illustrate this, for instance when governments reduce spending
to meet the targets set by the IMF, hospitals and schools receive less funding.
This in turn leads to fewer doctors and fewer teachers as well as very little
supplies in these very important institutions in all communities. This directly
violates economic and social rights, which are protected under international
agreements like the United Nations Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural
Rights. These rights ensure people have access to adequate food, housing and
medical care. However, it is observed that SAPs can make it very hard to
achieve these rights in any country.
A
plethora of studies have shown that SAPs have led to higher rates of poverty
and inequality in many African countries including Zambia. These programmes are
seen to prioritize quick economic fixes over social protection. Critics have
argued that these programs force families to make tough choices like pulling
children out of school to work or skipping medical visits due to new user fees
that have been introduced. In Sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty was already
widespread, SAPs worsened these issues by increasing unemployment through
layoffs in the public sector and making imported goods more expensive due to
currency devaluation. Women, who often manage household budgets and work in the
informal sectors are seen to be the ones who bear much of this burden as they act
as shock absorbers for the family during tough times. This gender inequality is
one of the key aspects that have been overlooked as it limits opportunities for
women and perpetuates cycles of poverty.
It
is seen that there is a casual link between SAPs and poorer health outcomes,
especially for mothers and children. A review of studies has found that these
programmes increase infant and child mortality rates by reducing access to
affordable health care and nutrition. For example, wage caps on public workers
cause skilled health professionals to leave for better-paying jobs abroad,
which leaves communities without essential workers. There are also indirect
effects, like the continuous rising food prices from subsidy cuts. In many
Zambian communities especially urban shanty compounds, this has led to
malnutrition, further harming maternal and child health. These are some of the
problems that were seen after the introduction of SAPs in Zambia after
1991.
Structural Adjustment in Zambia: How SAPs Undermined Basic Rights
In Zambia, SAPs worked by shrinking the role played by
the state in the economy. Conditions such as privatisation were targeted at
inefficient firms that were being run by the state. Scholars have argued that
this privatisation was done without safety nets and led to mass layoffs of
employees. For instance, at Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), employment
dropped by 1997 as many workers were laid off as a direct result of
privatisation. Records show that over 10,000 jobs were lost through
redundancies or early retirements. In a similarly manner, Zambia Airways was
liquidated in 1994 and left over 1,000 workers jobless overnight. These job cuts
violated the right to work, as enshrined in international human rights
standards and forced families into poverty shortly after these occurrences.
It has been observed that the removal of subsidies on
essential commodities like maize meal and fertilizer doubled the prices of
commodities almost immediately. This action sparkled the 1990 Maize Riots on
the Copperbelt, Luapula and Northern provinces where some people died as the
citizens clashed with the police. This not only breached the right to food but
also fueled broader civil unrest in the country as the government sometimes
responded through repression. The actions by the government undermined the
freedoms of assembly and expression as enshrined in the Constitution. During
this period, public spending on health and education fell sharply as user fees
were introduced in clinics and schools a situation that deterred the poor from
seeking health care or learning. By 1998, poverty affected the majority of
Zambians than they were in 1991, with rural areas hit the hardest as agricultural
support boards had collapsed. It is seen that, women, who often headed
households or worked in the informal sector faced extra burdens such as higher
childcare costs, harassment in unregulated markets and neglected maternal
health programmes during this period of privatisation.
Zambian economist Gilbert Mudenda captured this early
on, critiquing the “ideological intrusion from the IMF and the World Bank,
which glorified privatisation as the universal panacea for all economic ills in
all societies including Zambia.” His point underscores a key flaw, being that,
SAPs ignored the unique context of the Zambian economy which primarily relies
mostly on copper exports and the history of development that was actually led
by the state. These Bretton Woods institutions
treated the economy of Zambia like a blank slate for market experiments as opposed
to introducing a programme that would be workable for the country in all
facets.
Life on the Ground: Local Realities and Overlooked Struggles
It is seen that Zambia
adopted one of the most rigorous SAPs in Africa in 1991, following years of
economic decline during the reign of president Kenneth Kaunda. The
experiences of SAPs in Zambia reveal a pattern of harms that occurred across
many sectors and regions of the country. These harms have been seen to have amplified the vulnerabilities
of many communities in Zambia. For instance, in the mining heartland of Zambia,
the Copperbelt province, privatization dismantled ZCCM without retraining or
pensions for the workers that worked in most of the mines in this region. This
in turn left most ex-miners like those interviewed in focus groups destitute,
despite working for many years. Some former worker revealed going days without
food, digging wells for water after utility bills went unpaid and watching
family ties fray as spouses left and took their children and house possessions.
A good number of the laid-off Zambia Airways staff died since 1994 from
untreated illnesses as they were unable to afford even basic drugs like Panadol
since employer health benefits had vanished after privatisation. This eroded
health rights, with infant mortality and malnutrition rising as mothers
struggled after the government cut subsidies on essential commodities. It is
observed that maize which is the staple food in Zambia, became unaffordable, a
phenomenon that breached the rights of women to participate in economic activities
under international conventions that provide for the rights of women.
After the introduction of SAPs, it is observed that education
suffered too. The government slashed budget allocations on important sectors
such as education. This led to the payment of school fees in many government schools.
This new development kept children out of class, especially girls in rural
areas where families prioritized the education of boys or farm labour. Enrollment
into school dropped and teachers fled public teaching jobs where the wages were
relatively low and opted for better
opportunities abroad. This phenomenon is seen to have widened the urban-rural
divides in the education sector as most rural teachers fled in search of better
opportunities elsewhere. In the shanty towns of Lusaka, informal traders who in
most cases where women, faced fierce competition from retrenched workers who
now begun to flood markets after being laid off. One rural respondent recalled
abandoning her fish-selling business due to oversupply of the commodity as this
business had attracted new entrants who were mostly the retrenched workers.
This informal sector flood, without credit or skills training, trapped people
into low-productivity cycles in the hope of making a living. Critics argue that
this violated the rights to decent work for all citizens.
The rural parts of Zambia felt the sting of the
introduction of SAPs through dismantled cooperatives and marketing boards. The
farmers in Northern Province lost access to affordable farming inputs, an occurrence
that led to crop failure and migration to cities. It is during this time that
Zambia saw the growth of shanty compounds without proper services. The introduction
of SAPs led to rural urban migration as most rural dwellers begun to migrate to
urban towns in search of better opportunities. The famines of 1986-87 were seen to have been
worsened by policies that were seen to be focused on exports. This highlighted the
deadly toll on food insecurity in the country at the time. The food insecurity
situation continued leading to food riots in most parts of the country, with
the most happening on the Northern regions of the country as earlier stated. On
the political scene, SAPs bred cynicism as trade unions like the Zambia
Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU) were weakened, with the trade union leaders
being urged to tell workers to “die a little” for national recovery. This
phrase rang deep in the minds of citizens while the elites pocketed the windfalls of privatisation.
Critics of SAPs have argued that these programmes have only benefited a select
few at the expense of the majority of the Zambian populous.
Many Zambian health experts, reflecting on these
shifts, have continued to argue for balanced planning before introducing such
programmes. They are of the opinion that planning is needed precisely because
structural deficiencies in setting priorities will always exist in a developing country like Zambia. The ultimate
social function of the government should remain that of redistribution of
resources to all sectors so as to benefit the citizenry. This critique points
to the fact that SAPs’ have failed to redistribute gains and have instead
concentrated wealth among foreign investors and a few local cronies.
Why SAPs Failed: The Design Flaws, Implementation Failures and the Human
Costs of SAPs
The defenders of SAPs claim that they stabilized the
economy of Zambia and reduced inflation from 200% in 1993 to single digits by
the late 1990s. They claim that the introduction of these programmes boosted
copper exports as the mining sector was now opened to foreign investment. Despite
these assertions, some Zambian scholars counter that these wins had actually
masked deeper failures of the programme. They argue that the introduction of
SAPs by the government meant prioritizing debt repayment over the general well-being
of the people of Zambia. Some economists noted how main players in a number of sectors of the
economy became foreign experts and local anchormen of the IMF and the World
Bank. This to a large extent, has compromised the quality of Structural
Adjustment Programmes that have emerged in Africa as the pioneers of these
programmes look at their gain and not the gain of the country at large. Critics
have argued that this external dominance ignored local needs, a situation that
led to bad sequencing as the government is said to have rushed into privatisation
before building the capacity of the private sector to handle the privatised industries which were actually an important part of
the Zambian economy.
It is argued that while structural adjustment is
necessary, it is not sufficient. Structural Adjustment Programmes are concerned
essentially and primarily with monetarist adjustment and not transformation of
a country. It has been argued that SAPs perpetuated dependence via trickle-down
theory as development depended on those who funded the programmes. They failed
to deliver democracy or development to the rural poor and urban shanties of
Zambia. Evidence supports this as the GDP grew modestly after 1991, but per
capita income fell by a third over two decades and life expectancy dipped amid the
prevalence of HIV/AIDS and service cuts during this period.
It is said that women bore the disproportionate burden
during this time, UN reports noted that the structural adjustment programmes
had led to the neglect of social development and brought with them diminishing
opportunities for women. It is seen that cuts in the civil service which is the
main employer of citizens in the country exacerbated inequality in the country.
Other authors have echoed this and have criticized how SAPs widened gender gaps
without safeguards. Moreover, repression followed civil unrest in the country.
The police crackdowns on riots done by the citizens violated civil rights and
turned economic pain into political suppression.
Even president F.T.J Chiluba, an early SAP champion,
later admitted flaws pf these programmes and emphasized that “human dignity
derives from ensuring the basic entitlements to man.” He stated that: “citizens
must have equal opportunities and access to good shelter, food, education,
health and gainful employment.” Scholar Michael Gubser has quoted the words of
Mbita Chitala, a former deputy minister of finance during the period SAPs were
introduced saying, Chitala 10 years later reflected on his own past defences by
confessing that: “ he was ashamed of defending structural adjustment programmes
with such zeal… I was just parroting bourgeois nonsense with attractive words.”
These admissions highlight a consensus that there were design flaws in the SAPs.
There was overreliance on markets without equity which then outweighed the
benefits of these programmes and in turn violated human rights by their design.
Conclusion
The story of SAPs in Zambia is one of lost jobs in the mines, empty classrooms in the villages and broken families in the compounds of Lusaka. This is a legacy of reforms that stabilized the books of accounts but shattered the lives of the majority citizens. As scholars have shown through decades of analysis, these programs overlooked human rights and deepened poverty for the majority of Zambians while enriching a select few. There is empirical evidence from redundancies at ZCCM and the doubled workloads suffered by women during this time. SAPs prioritized austerity measures over transformation, fueling inequality and unrest without the promised growth. This critique offers hope as Zambian voices call for alternatives such as debt relief, community-led planning and social safety nets that embed rights from the start. Today, with Zambia still grappling with debt, policymakers must heed the lessons of the past as economic recovery without human dignity is no recovery at all. By integrating the assessment of rights and participatory reforms, Zambia can honour its independence ideals and ensure no one is left to “die a little” for stability that is actually merely academic or moot.
About the author: Clement Ngoma is a Lecturer in Law at the Copperbelt
University in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.