COMMITMENT IS CENTRAL TO UPLIFTING PEOPLE'S LIVES

June 2004

Zambia’s socioeconomic challenges such as malnutrition at household level with its various manifestations in children, HIV/AIDS, inadequate health care and quality of education, unemployment, inadequate household incomes, etc., require efforts beyond just having well enunciated plans, observes the JCTR.

“Of prime importance in addition to resource prioritization,” says Muweme Muweme, Coordinator of the Social Conditions Research Project of the JCTR, “is strong commitment by leaders at different levels to addressing Zambia’s problems.  Lack of strong commitment has unfortunately been characteristic in dealing with Zambia’s problems.

The failure to achieve development targets that have been set incessantly in recent decades can by and large be explained by a lack of strong commitment to translate plans into real action to change the lives of the majority poor people.  Time and again meetings are held at both local and international levels to look at the plight of the poor.  But rarely do these meetings result into tangible benefits for the poor.  “For how long will the poor wait before experiencing positive change in their lives?”, asks Muweme.

The JCTR Basic Needs Basket has continued to show the socioeconomic difficulties households face in Zambia through highlighting the cost of basic needs in relationship to people’s incomes.  For example, for the month of May, while recording some marginal reductions in the price of mealie meal from an average cost of K30,000 in April to the current cost of K29,000, the overall cost of food alone of K456,400 remains very high for many households in Zambia.  This is especially true taking into account that households have to meet other costs such as education, health, transport, etc.

According to Muweme, this state of affairs is unacceptable and needs to change so that we move to addressing human problems, especially on the basis of the inherent dignity of every human being.  It is necessary therefore that every leader at different levels, both local and international, should move with a spirit of strong commitment to change the situations of the poor.

The Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), Zambia’s current road map to uplifting the poor, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set for 2015 (e.g., reducing by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day, ensuring that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling) should be viewed as very critical challenges to Zambia from the moral, economic, political and social points view.  Following these guidelines requires strong commitment, seen in priorities, sacrifice and seriousness.

JCTR believes that without strong commitment and the realization of the inherent dignity of the human person as basis for development efforts, there will always be less to be achieved in uplifting the conditions of the people, especially the poor whose composition is largely women.

“As a nation, it is long over due that we have a foundation of committing ourselves to addressing the difficulties Zambia is facing,” says Muweme.