(The Nationalist, 29 March 2002)
Before I left Zambia in 1997, I was parish priest in a suburban parish called Malengwa. A hall had been built there about 1972 for local community activities. It was used as a nursery in the mornings, and in the afternoons by women’s groups. In the evenings, secondary school children who did not have light in their houses used it for study. It had good facilities, including a kitchen, a library, a stage, a projection room for films, a large assembly room and storage space. It had cost about 1200 kwacha to build, the kwacha (K) being the Zambian unit of currency.
Recently I received a letter from a friend in Zambia. The stamps caught my attention, three of them, at K500 each. That means K1200 to build a hall in 1972, and K1500 to air mail a letter thirty years later. That is devaluation.
The kwacha began its life at 50 pence sterling. Then sterling sank and the kwacha rose, driven upwards by high prices paid for copper, Zambia’s main export, in the manufacture of munitions during the Viet-Nam war, until it reached a level of 62 pence. Then the tide turned and now the exchange rate is about five thousand kwacha to the pound sterling. I have in front of me a Zambian bank note of K100. At one time it was worth £62 sterling. It would have bought a 220 litre drum of diesel. Now it is worth 2 pence. Savings have been wiped out and money discredited among a people for whom its use is still new. A newspaper now costs more than a Landrover did in the seventies.
Next time you hear a debate on Third World debt, spare a thought for people caught in that trap. Part of the responsibility rests with international financial institutions which assertively pushed loans of petro-dollars in the middle seventies with the promise of low rates of interest. Then rates rose – do you remember 21%? – and prices of goods exported by Third World countries fell. Squeezed from both sides, the currencies were “floated” – and sank.
The result is poverty and malnutrition, clinics without medicine, hospitals without doctors, ambulances without fuel, schools without chalk, children without exercise books, falling life expectancy, rising infant mortality and so on and on.
What was it that Mahatma Gandhi said? – ‘There is enough in the world for everyone’s need. There is not enough for everyone’s greed’. We are citizens of one world. We insist, rightly, that less fortunate members of our nation have a safety net provided for them. We need to recognize the same principle at the international level. And it is our own interest to do so, if we have the eyes to see it. A world of extremes is a dangerous world; a world where everyone has an equitable share is a world with real hope of peace.