Kelvin Chisanga on IMF extended credit with its implications to Zambia, as it shows a mark of economic progress!

Kelvin Chisanga

Following a number of media calls received today from various media houses as I also physically made an appearance this morning on the Diamond TV Zambia to make pertinent comments about this approved facility.

First and foremost in my own personal view with a scope of a general consensus, Zambia has been faced with a number of headwinds, very challenging situation to say of the list especially this year owing to the fact that there has been a number of sizeable challenging factors emanating from global market patterns, regional conflict contrasting with strong regional demand of agriculture outputs and finally to most internal matters of the land such as the cost pressure poised on most key commodities, experiences of low mineral productions negatively complementing with less impact seen with the agriculture outputs during harvest time coupled with low export volumes.

So, in essence the growth patterns that we are seeing in this year’s GDP profile is strongly coming from non-mining and non-agriculture sectors of the local economy, boosting relatively a fair deal though with much resilient conditions, and of course with these patterns of support by other complementary sectors as indicated in the local economy, has not weigh in much support on the export side, instead sectors such as the tourism, manufacturing, transport, ICT etc, are ones reverberating with good energies, have since given to this strong transmission to the 2023 performances.

However, coming to debt situation, IMF is still oxidizing into the debt effects and its our cooling agent in this matter, so following discussions and reviews with last month’s staff level agreement which is even about $184 million as reached thereof, gave IMF Board to signal an approved for the second leg of financing $187 million towards the basket of $1.3 Billion planned in 38 months cover.

The commitment by all stakeholders to have in place and do the review of Zambia’s IMF-supported program provides a strong basement to anchor economic balance, undertaking critical care in areas within social protection.

Zambia has maintained its efforts to stabilize the economy despite recurrent external shocks. It has been seen and fully established that our local economy is pretty much showing some good levels of resilience despite many offsetting balances from the external forces, though this year’s projection of growth is sitting at 4.3% and 4.7% for the material year of 2024, projected to be stronger contrarily to the estimations as predicated.

Zambia’s policy energy driving to build efforts on economic recovery, showing tight anchor on fiscal plans, fair debt treatment plans, fostering a strong balance on monetary policy system, anchoring good safe-net on social sector, embracing a firm ground on public finance policy will help gravitate Zambia’s economic stability in the wake of championing inclusive growth.