THE management of a crisis is part of everyday governance. Floods, power outages, droughts disease outbreaks, among others, have continued to be part of the challenges that different Zambian governments have had to deal with.
Therefore, good governments are seen from how they manage and mitigate crises.
The level of concern from Government and the measures that the Government puts in place to avert the situation counts alongside how long it takes to respond to the crises and efforts in containing their negative effects.
In this vein, we take a look at the Patriotic Front (PF) and United Party for National Development (UPND) governments’ ways of dealing with crises.
The New Dawn Government took over office when the country was contending with the third wave of COVID-19.
The response to the crisis was to depoliticise the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Ministry of Health, Local Government and Rural Development authorities, civil society and the church were empowered to provide answers to the COVID-19 crisis.
Transparency on utilisation of COVID-19 funds was enhanced.
The Government succeeded in not only avoiding mortality but also the spread of the pandemic.
Similarly, the New Dawn Government has allowed people to freely express themselves on various issues affecting them.
People are free to complain about load shedding, high fuel prices, high cost of living and many others without them being labelled bitter or glossily censored.
Rather, the New Dawn Government has embraced such complaints as part of its feedback mechanism.
For example, people complained about escalating mealie meal prices.
In response, the Government has already set up Zambia National Service milling plants that are already offloading cheaper mealie meal on the market.
These milling plants will eventually be in all Provinces. Whilst some people would argue that the Vice President WK Mutale Nalumango asked Zambians to eat roller meal in the face of high mealie meal prices, the point remains immaterial considering that her government managed to respond to the crisis by reducing the mealie meal prices within no time.
In the same vein, when load-shedding hit the country from around December 2022, the Government tirelessly worked to find the root cause in order to fix the problem.
Various players were engaged in order to find both short term and long term solutions.
Today, loading-shedding has been completely overcome with Zesco management announcing that households and industries shall once again have 24 hours of power.
Long term solutions are also being worked out as investments in energy mix are taking shape.
In a more or less the same vein, as a result of the heavy rains that were experienced in January 2023, floods have hit the country: among other things, bridges and roads have been damaged, houses have collapsed, livestock killed, and crop fields have been flooded. Southern, Central, Western, Eastern and Luapula provinces are some of the worst hit.
In response, the Government has moved in to avert the crisis and yet quietly so.
Affected families have been resettled in record time.
Adequate provisions of relief food and extra farmer input support packs have been distributed to affected regions.
All this has been done without the Government politicising the process by giving people UPND branded mealie meal and/or food packs.
Furthermore, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine that has affected the world supply of oil and affected oil pricing, the New Dawn Government has continued to invest in long-term solutions to Liquid Petroleum Gas by continuing to work on measures to stabilise and reduce the cost of petroleum products on the Zambian market.
Some of these measures include bilateral negotiations with Zimbabwe for use of the Zimbabwean oil pipeline to cut down on transportation costs of petrol.
Additionally, Government is close to completing the Lusaka Bulk Fuel Depot which will provide critical storage for strategic petroleum reserves.
Engagements with Angola and Namibia for additional oil pipelines are also progressing well.
Further, the Government has been providing a fertile business environment to enhance private sector-led bulk procurement system in order to ensure security of supply and predictability in the market.
All these measures are meant to provide solutions to the fuel crisis on the market.
Compare this with the PF government’s ways of dealing with crises:
When load-shedding hit the country around 2018/2019, the PF’s solution to the citizens was arrogantly asking them to go and urinate in Lake Kariba in order to raise the water levels.
At a time when Zambians complained about the hiked electricity tariffs by Zesco Limited, they asked those who could not afford the new electricity tariffs to switch off power and use ‘tukoloboyi’ (traditional improvised lighting).
Similarly, when the cost of living was shooting up with among other things, price of bread rising beyond people’s means, they asked the people to eat ‘kandolo’ (sweet potatoes).
When floods hit some parts of the country, they responded by distributing party labelled food packs to the affected.
The Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU) took centre stage, distributing PF labelled mealie meal, and seed packs politicising the relief provided to the affected communities.
Even a crisis of the nature of COVID-19 had to be politicised. Not surprising, DMMU, together with the Ministry of Health, is at the centre of the corruption probe into how donations towards COVID-19 were used.
In many cases, reports of corruption in the award of contracts to distribute face masks and other medical provisions were registered.
Clearly, under the PF administration, crises management was a politicised process whenever it attracted the attention of government.
Further, those complaining about high cost of living were mocked, censored and attacked.
In some strange instances, the ruling party’s cadres were pushed on the streets to display themselves as having lots of money in order to silence those complaining about high cost of living.
Funny as the responses could have been from the PF leadership, what was so painful was the lack of solutions to the genuine problems that people faced.
The PF administration did not only make fun of disasters but also ensured that no one dared to complain about these pressing situations.
Those that dared to speak were harassed, attacked, jailed and labelled to be bitter.
In a nutshell, the New Dawn Government is providing the type of crisis management expected of a caring government.
It is doing so in a responsible manner aimed at benefitting the affected quarters without floating a political stance usually meant to gain political mileage.
The depoliticisation of crisis management process has not only resulted in an efficient response to crisis management and mitigation but also eliminated corruption and abuse of public resources.
The author is a public and economic policy analyst