2.1 Pre-colonial and Colonial Era .1 Early mining activity
2.2.5 The ZCCM era
now obviously suffering from what President Kaunda acknowledged as a combination of management problems and generally difficult economic times.186
Mounting chaos within the mining community mirrored turmoil within government.
The one-party democracy Kaunda had introduced in 1972 was supposed to align Zambia more closely with African traditional values. But it also allowed the president to consolidate power. Within his cabinet there was internal dissention and Kaunda frequently reshuffled ministers' assignments. Ordinary citizens had already begun registering their disapproval by dropping out of the voting process.187
Nchanga's copper alchemical sign, Zambians joked the only thing consolidation changed was that the N in NCCM had fallen over on its side.191
The company was huge. And "Mother ZCCM," as it was sometimes referred to in casual conversation, was relied upon for mass employment and continuation of the social programs and infrastructure maintenance that previous mine ownerships had begun.192
[A] parastatal is a parastatal; it's a socialist approach to things. And the agendas are different. So [ZCCM] became an employment vehicle for obvious reasons when 95% of the people are in informal employment. You know, a huge percentage of the people are informally employed—gainfully but informally. So staffing went up, the population of workers went up but production was going down. Investment wasn't there for a number of reasons.
But, quite frankly, it comes down to whether you're in business or you're in politics. The CEOs were all appointed from State House...And it just went the way of most parastatal companies, government owned companies.
Inefficient, lethargic; there's a lot of hokey pokey going on where the money went.193
Such nationwide reliance upon ZCCM also stretched the company's resources in numerous, perhaps unexpected, ways.
[B]ecause [ZCCM] was the most efficient company in the country, had more disciplined labour and so on with procedures, government then started to extend it to run busses so...Mulungushi Investments then started to run a fleet of...busses on the Copperbelt...and even going out into the provinces...We started a timber company...We had two of our own planes...[W]e went into farming. We developed—in fact the largest farm probably in Southern Africa was developed by ZCCM called Mukumpu—next to Mpongwe. It was designed to feed Copperbelt Province, Luapula Province, and Northwestern.
Three provinces from one farm...We went into construction...We went into lodges. We started running the Kasaba Bay up in the North...So we got extended...And all those resources now were coming—the managing director of the bus company came from within the company. The engineers were taken out from the company...to go in there. They would recruit. But they
Some outside observers saw an excessively formal work style in a mine setting as ultimately indicative of bad management. In imitation of British executives, those directing ZCCM would go to work in suits and ties, but
"are you going to go out and see how things are really running if you're all dressed like that in your cool office?" pondered an expatriate consultant who regularly wore jeans and T-shirts. Interview with independent technical consultant assigned to ZCCM privationzation project, 2006.
191 Ibid.
92 Interview with senior manager, Copperbelt mining company, 2004; Hobson, "ZCCM," 10-11.
' Interview with long term resident, departmental and divisional manger, Copperbelt mining company, 2005.
H H H H H M . . . .
would say, "Go and help out. Go and do that,"...and then it got to a position where if the government had a problem procuring medicines because we had a procurement agency in London, in the UK, they would then ask us, "Can you buy medicines for government offices because we haven't got medicine."...
When the Pope came to visit Zambia, he had a mass in Kitwe. We did everything. We cleared land. This was a bush. We cleared, put up a platform for him, all the things and so forth. Now the vice-chairman of ZCCM was in charge because he was a Catholic anyway. He was in the Church. But because there was nobody—you would look to nobody else. So this was a grand thing, successful, run by.. .ZCCM. So we did this thing.
When there was a mess in the football association of Zambia, you know, the whole of Zambia football association, they picked a guy from ZCCM. "Go and be the president." Somebody with influence to be the president. And therefore the secretariat would be somebody from ZCCM. So all that provided by ZCCM. And that's how the resources became so extended that there wasn't much now going back into developing the mines...We basically... were running this country.194
Still strapped for cash, government began negotiating a first Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) with the World Bank and the Bank's outside consultants began arriving.
Technical experts examined all aspects of the mines' operations, wrote numerous reports, and made recommendations. Their assignments were originally viewed as short term, lasting only a few weeks at a time. But several experts ended up spending the equivalent of five or six years on the Copperbelt from the mid-1980s until 2000.195 On the Zambian side support work for the outside consultants was sufficiently heavy to warrant a full-time staff member for a number of years as well.
The policy measures accompanying Zambia's new SAP were typical for such situations. They included abolition of certain import restrictions, further removal of price controls, liberalization of interest rates, and restrictions on government expenditures. At this
Interview with former ZCCM general manager and current senior executive, Copperbelt mining company, 2004.
The consultants' presence was controversial not only among Zambian staff but for remaining expatriates who apparently saw them as threatening to their own job security. Interviews with independent technical consultants assigned to ZCCM privatization project, 2005, 2006; Interview with ZCCM-IH administrator, 2005.
point, however, the Kaunda government began objecting to directions about subsidy dropping when the orders came from countries that controlled prices themselves.
[A]t that time they were making us reduce assistance...And we reduced [multiple subsidies] until we came to about three: It was mealie meal, fertilizer, and oil—fuel for transport and so on and so forth. And the argument then—they insisted that we should just scrap all of them. And we said, "Look at the list—what we have done. We have reduced—
accommodated you up to—but mealie meal is critical to the needs of our people. We cannot do that. Fuel affects—the price of fuel affects the whole economy because transport and all the costs of production are going to go up if the price of fuel goes up. Fertilizer is agriculture. We want to promote agriculture so that our people can continue to sustain their production.. .We've gone as far as we can go..."
Subsidies are used in America very heavily. Subsidies are used in France...So in a way they were asking us to do what they themselves were [not] doing in one way or the other...It was not a question of simply saying
"We don't want to do it" because we had been working with the IMF and the World Bank all along and supporting the programmes and undertaking the programmes that they were recommending us.1
Confusion and conflict erupted among policy makers and the public. The World Bank gave Zambia mixed signals on how to handle its monetary policy.197 And, when government did finally do away with mealie meal subsidies, riots broke out on the Copperbelt.198
The world copper price dropped again and in 1987 Kaunda's government abandoned the World Bank's Structural Adjustment Program, implementing its own New Economic Recovery Programme (NERP).199 Bilateral donors responded to these changes by freezing
196 Interview with former economic advisor to President Kaunda, 2005.
1 7 Situmbeko and Zulu, Zambia: Condemned to Debt, 20-21.
98 Interview with former ZCCM senior manager, 2004; Kaoma, "Democratic Crisis in Southern Africa," 19.
199 Kaunda's government had produced other comprehensive development plan documents for the nation in the 1960s and 1970s. The program of the late 1980s did not forfeit its repayment obligations but did limit debt service payments to 10% of net export earning after required foreign exchange reserve quotas had been withheld. The government had also suspended payments to the World Bank once before. See Situmbeko and Zulu, Zambia: Condemned to Debt, 20-23, 57ff and Silavwe, Some Aspects of Personnel Management, 7-10 for excellent discussions of these events.