By AUSTIN KALUBA –
THE transfer of 29 out of 33 State-owned enterprises (SOEs) from the Ministry of Finance to the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) by President Edgar Lungu is highly progressive.
The move would certainly promote competence since ministries would now focus on policy making, giving the IDC direct mandate and authorisation to oversee performance and accountability of the SOEs on behalf of the Government.
The decentralisation exercise would maximise the value of Government shareholding and ensure that SOEs contribute to the Sovereign Wealth Fund (SWF) which will focus on stimulating investment in strategic non-mining industries to increase exports.
As the Head of State said, the Patriotic Front (PF) Government is committed to industrialisation and job creation in order to create a better Zambia for all.
The transfer is a giant leap in achieving President Lungu’s creation of more than 500,000 jobs for the youth by the end of 2016.
As the President stated during the launch of the 2015 National Youth Policy and Action Plan on Empowerment and Employment recently, this is not an era of rhetoric that succeeds on scoring short-term political mileage at the expense of long-term sustainable national and youth development goals.
Doubting Thomases have been asking how 500,000 jobs can be created despite President Lungu stating that the jobs will be created through implementation of the national apprenticeship and internship schemes.
He said this would ultimately create employment for the unskilled youth within participating companies, expansion of low interest credit facilities targeting new and growing youth-led enterprises, and provision of ongoing business support services, including mentorship to youth-led businesses.
In case people have short memories, the railway company in this country at one time employed more people than the mines.
The other fertile source of employment is the Zambia National Service which can employ several people through creation of provincial State farms.
If the transferred SOEs which will now be superintended and owned by the IDC are managed properly, job creation will not be an insurmountable task that it appears to be.
In most cases decentralisation promotes efficiency as noted by political philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Stuart Mills, Alexis de Tocqueville, Baron de Montesquieu and James Madison as early as the 17th and 18th centuries.
All these thinkers distrusted autocratic central governments and observed that small, democratic units like ancient Athens could preserve the liberties of free men.
In several of the Federalist papers, James Madison theorised about the prevention of tyranny via a balance of powers not only among the branches of the Central Government, but between central and regional and local governments as well.
The transfer of State-owned enterprises to the IDC should, therefore, be hailed as the right step in the economic Canaan that has eluded Zambia for decades.