By Chanda Chisala.
Imagine we are at the height of the COVID-19 Pandemic and the United States decides to donate vaccines and masks to Zambia, but half of these get stolen by people at the Ministry of Health so that they can sell them to the public secretly. Would it make sense for the US to say “we won’t send you any more COVID vaccines and life-saving masks any more”? This would be a strange decision because many more lives would be lost without such assistance, even if it is tainted by corruption and theft.
That imaginary situation is exactly identical to the recent shocking decision by the US to withhold medical assistance to Zambia without warning. Yes, there is rampant theft involved in the medical aid “business,” but is withholding such aid the most practical solution? Surely there are other ways the US can impose accountability measures on the Zambian government without endangering the lives of so many people who are dependent on this assistance.
Personally, I am ultimately against the existence of all such aid because it makes poor countries too dependent on the discretion of the benefactor. It is risky to put the health of your people at the mercy of a foreign government, and the Zambian government should find a way of weaning the country from all such dependence. But it can only be done after finding self-sustaining alternatives to the status quo. It is therefore quite inhumane for the US to withdraw such aid before they could first ensure that the country they have helped become dependent on them finds another way to provide healthcare to its people. It doesn’t take one day to build a new system of health provision if your entire healthcare infrastructure was built on the promise of aid.
The bottom line is that lives are being saved by these donations even when theft is involved in the process, just as vaccines or masks were saving lives even if crooked middlemen were no doubt involved in their distribution. This does not mean we are defending the evil and greedy thefts at the ministry of health; it only means we encourage a more humane solution that considers the risks of instant withdrawal.
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The author, Chanda Chisala, is the Founder of Zambia Online and Khama Institute. He is formerly a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and Visiting Scholar to the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank at Stanford. You can follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/chandachisala.
I think it silly to beg a donor, despite how dire your situation is. The US can abruptly end any aid at any time.
To state that the aid was withdrawn without warning isn’t factual first of all as the ambassador did state they have been engaging with the government since 2021. Secondly, we have been given up to 2026 to transition, its not cold turkey situation.
How can you say the US withdrew the medical aid without warning when they have said they have been engaging the Zambian goverment for over a year. And we have a government which does not work but fixated on the past, reason they are saying these things started before their time, we are not interested in when it started, we are interested in the government stopping this Vice which has seen the proliferation of drug stores on most streets of Zambia. Start working please