Mark Lynas
© Excerpt taken from The No-Nonsense Guide to Globalization, by Wayne Ellwood (Verso Press, 2001)
 

                                                            Africa's Hidden Killers
                                                                            by Mark Lynas(*)
 

People are dying quietly, but in huge numbers, all over Zambia. Not because of some accident of nature but as a direct result of economic policies imposed by faceless Western planners. For over 20 years the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have been forcing structural adjustment programs (SAPs) on the bankrupt countries of Africa, blind to the havoc they are causing. Almost every country on the continent has succumbed.

"If you want to see the impact of structural adjustment," says Emily Sikazwe, director of the antipoverty group Women for Change, "go to University Teaching Hospital (UTH) in Lusaka."

 In a packed ward in UTH, the city's biggest hospital, emaciated figures shiver under sparse bedclothes. Families crowd around, bringing food to the sick to supplement the meager hospital rations of beans and maize meal. In another ward rows of children lie on small beds, slowly passing away from preventable diseases like TB, malaria and pneumonia.

 In a cleaner, neater ward on the other side of the building half the beds stand empty. This is the fee-paying section where families who can pay a 100,000 kwacha ($40) deposit can buy a slightly better chance of life. This is what some World Bank bureaucrats refer to as "user-responsive" healthcare.

 Meanwhile in the shantytown of Misisi four out of five people are unemployed, part of an army of jobless created when economists from the World Bank and IMF decided that Zambia's public sector was "bloated" and would benefit from the tonic of privatization. But half the state-owned companies sold are now bankrupt and thousands are out of work. Others like Esnart Banda, a widow with five children, survive against the odds. She makes about 2,000 kwacha ($0.60) a day selling vegetables in a market near Misisi. Most days she can only afford one meal for her children, even though the youngest is suffering from TB. Her kids join the 40 percent of Zambia's child population suffering from chronic under-nutrition.

 "Africa can only develop with the participation of its people," says Emily Sikazwe. This is what Zambian NGOs are now focusing on. They are demanding that Africans be allowed to decide how their countries are run. But if IMF and World Bank economists are to respect this demand they will have to leave their plush offices in Washington to visit Lusaka and, if they're serious, UTH and Misisi. And for once they'll need to listen to what people there say.
 

(*) Mark Lynas is a freelance writer specializing in environment and development issues.