Alastair Fraser | Oxford University

Of Cabbages and King Cobra: populist politics and Zambia’s 2006 election

co-authored with Miles Larmer. African Affairs, October 2007, 106/425, 611–637. http://afraf.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/106/425/611

Zambia’s 2006 election was won by incumbent President Levy Mwanawasa and his Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD). However, it is argued here that the most important outcome of the campaign was the successful articulation of a new populist politics by Michael Sata’s Patriotic Front (PF), which won a significant majority in urban areas. Sata’s attacks on foreign investors (particularly from China) for their abuse of the workforce and their supposedly corrupt relationship with the MMD resonated with urban Zambians, already angered by the negative impact of economic liberalization. PF’s campaign injected popular social demands into what had become a moribund political debate. The MMD government is now adopting PF policies in an attempt to restore its own urban support base. The article describes the campaign and its outcomes, contrasting the political discourse of the MMD and PF and analysing the differences in voting behaviour between rural and urban Zambians. It argues that recent relief of 92 percent of Zambia’s international debt, along with the renewed
profitability of the copper mining industry, have created conditions for the re-emergence of a nationalist-developmental political framework.

Zambia: Back to the Future?

Paper presented at the American Political Science Association Conference, 2007, Chicago

Since the mid-1980s, Zambia has been identified as an emblematic case of a country dominated by its donors. Massive debt and aid dependency have weakened the government’s ability to negotiate with external actors, to set its own policies and to act on the wishes of its citizens. Abrahamsen (2000) described a ‘disciplined democracy’, in which conditionality had been used by the Bretton Woods Institutions to enforce their prescriptions, with the result that no matter who was elected economic liberalization would follow. Yet, in the past two years, the possibility has been mooted that Zambia is reclaiming the initiative in its aid relationships. This paper argues that the opportunity to go ‘back to the future’ may arise if the country is able to take advantage of economic conditions somewhat reminiscent of the first two decades of independence from 1964 to 1984. However, the chapter concludes that the country is still being effectively disciplined, albeit through means more subtle than just conditionality. In order to achieve donor acceptance of this kind of Zambian leadership, the government would need to secure the high moral and political ground by presenting itself as the legitimate representative of a popular sentiment in favour of an ideologically-coherent national strategy. However, with legitimacy and ideological coherence in very short supply it is unsurprising that the aid strategy is predicated on dependence as a fact of life and that the Fifth National Development Plan is little more than a shopping list. The Zambian case suggests that, although ownership now forms a key element of donor rhetoric, both the ideological coherence and the political equality between donor and recipient that would be needed to breathe life into the principle of ownership have been eroded over the past twenty years.

For Whom The Windfalls? Winners and Losers in the Privatisation of Zambia's Copper Mines

Co-authored with John Lungu, January 2007, CSTNZ: Lusaka: www.minewatchzambia.com

Differing expectations about who should get what benefits from digging the wealth out of the ground are causing serious tensions in the Copperbelt region of Northern Zambia. Multinational copper-mining companies, the Zambian Government, workers and local communities all desperately want recently privatised copper mines to succeed, and for the region to return to its golden age as one of the most developed parts of Africa. Yet all have different beliefs about how to make it happen, and what rights and responsibilities should attach to private companies, the state and citizens.

After decades of decline, the price of copper has been rising at unprecedented levels since 2003. The value of Zambia’s copper exports more than doubled between 2005 and 2006, reaching US$2.78 billion. Government and the mining companies claim that all are benefiting from this boom on the Copperbelt. And yet in September 2006 Copperbelt voters roundly rejected current policies, electing to every urban seat in the region MPs representing the Patriotic Front (PF), a party that ran on a platform of deporting foreign investors that exploit the workforce, increasing corporate taxes and limiting foreign ownership of mines. This report aims to contribute to the discussion about the costs and benefits of privatisation and what might be done by Government, companies and donors to secure greater benefits for Zambia, and especially for those working in and living near the mines.

PRSPs: Now who calls the Shots?

Review of African Political Economy, 104-5, September 2005: http://taylorandfrancis.metapress.com/link.asp?id=x685033883067574

This paper argues that Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) can be understood as a technology of ‘social control’, which seeks to shape domestic political space. Despite widespread recognition that the World Bank and the IMF continue to impose orthodox policy conditions on debt relief and loans to African countries, many suggest the requirement in PRSPs for civil society ‘participation’ introduces a progressive element that could, in time, subvert the logic of coercion. In contrast, this paper suggests that it is precisely through participation that international Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and bilateral donors are working with the World Bank and IMF to secure ever more intimate supervision of African political communities. Thus, if the answer to Hanlon’s (1991) rhetorical question ‘who calls the shots?’ under structural adjustment was ‘the IFIs’, the answer under PRSPs is ‘an uneasy coalition of NGOs, donors and the IFIs’. These groups share an agenda of securing consent to liberal systems of political and economic management. Through
the PRSP and related processes they divide the labour required to manufacture consent, seeking to build ‘reform coalitions’ by transforming the objectives and nature of states, bureaucracies, social and political movements and, at their most ambitious, populations. In the process they imperil African sovereignty, self-determination and hopes for substantive democracy.

Aid recipient Sovereignty in Historical Context

Working Paper published by Global Economic Governance Programme, 2006 - Comments welcome. http://www.globaleconomicgovernance.org/docs/Fraser%20Aid%20Recipient%20Sovereignity.pdf

This chapter aims to resolve a conflict between hope and incredulity. The hope is that poor countries will be able to overcome the inequity of their relations with aid donors. A consensus is emerging that a small set of aid recipients are reclaiming ‘recipient ownership’, even ‘recipient sovereignty’. They are said to be co-opting rich country concerns with ‘donor co-ordination’ and ‘alignment’ with recipients’ national development plans in order to enforce a range of policies and administrative systems that constrain the behaviour of aid donors operating in their countries. ‘Ownership’ is now widely seen as a solution to both donor dominance and underdevelopment. The incredulity follows an observation on the list of countries being touted as blazing the trail towards this goal: Afghanistan, Vietnam, Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. They constitute several of the least sovereign countries on the globe. Four of the five rely so heavily on either foreign financial aid or military assistance that the states’ very survival, and that of many of their citizens, could be said to depend upon it. By developing a history of donor-recipient relations the chapter clarifies the particular opportunities to which these recipients are now responding and the potential of such strategies for a wider range of aid-dependent countries. It tells the story of how we got to where we are today, a situation in which, in many countries, donors dominate decision-making over what aid is spent on and what conditions attach to its release, and yet consistently deny their desire and capacity to do so. The chapter argues that the strategies that aid recipients adopt in seeking control in their relations with donors are heavily constrained by the negotiating capital they are able to bring into discussions and by ever-changing global political and economic circumstances. Without understanding what has been tried before and why it succeeded or failed, one runs the risk of assuming that contemporary donor dominance in aid relations results from recipient passivity. The corollary of this assumption can be a naïve acceptance of the claim that the situation might be remedied simply by recipients presenting their own preferred programme in order for it to be respected and funded by donors committed to ownership and partnership. Reflecting on how, historically, donors have responded to different expressions of recipient agency may help illuminate the limits of the possible in the present context. Understanding that recipients are aware of this history helps explain their current calculations and behaviour.