[stop-imf] WPost: Poverty in Zambia

[Robert Weissman]

Jon Jeter's excellent piece includes a real-life description of the
effects of structural adjustment, especially privatization, trade
liberalization and user fees.

Less Than $1 Means Family of 6 Can Eat

By Jon Jeter
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, February 19, 2002; Page A01

MARAMBA, Zambia -- She is sitting on a warped stool in a roofless market
with the ferocious midday sun bearing down on her. A sinewy woman with
deep-set eyes
and sharp features that jut sphinxlike from under her black head scarf,
Rose Shanzi awoke with a start this morning, and the primordial question
that jarred her from
sleep is stalking her again:

Will she and her children eat today?

It is always a compound question. With five children to feed, often
there is not enough food to go around; tough choices have to be made.
Still, all the answers Rose is
searching for today lie in the neat rows of tomatoes arranged by size,
ripeness and price on the wooden table standing at eye level before her.

"If I sell my tomatoes, we will eat today," she is saying simply. "If I
don't, we don't eat."

To buy enough food to get her family through another day, Rose will need
to earn roughly 75 cents.

Day in and day out, survival for one-fifth of the world's population
turns on what others consider loose change. Much as one woman in a
remote town in southern
Africa tries to keep hunger at bay for just a little longer, so too are
1.3 billion others throughout the developing world who earn, on average,
less than $1 a day.

The percentage of the world's population living on less than $1 a day is
smaller than it was 10 years ago. But in absolute terms it has hardly
budged in more than two
decades, actually inching up slightly from its 1990 level, according to
World Bank statistics, based on household surveys around the globe.

In this hardscrabble town on Zambia's southern border, nothing comes
easily. The 75 cents that Rose needs to make ends meet is about 50
percent more than she
ordinarily earns from her vegetable stand in a 12-hour day.

Moreover, the competition is stiff. Rose is one of no fewer than 4,000
vendors peddling everything from double-A batteries to zebra-skinned
love seats at Maramba's
sprawling market. At least a few dozen women here sell tomatoes just as
red and ripe as Rose's.

And although the tomatoes cost just a few pennies per handful, customers
are hard to come by. Jobs have evaporated since duty-free shipments of
foreign-made clothes
began pouring into Zambia a decade ago, shutting down virtually all of
the textile factories here and in the nearby city of Livingstone.

"No one has money anymore," Rose is saying as she sizes up a woman who
handled her vegetables but left without buying anything. "The town has
no buying power.
Selling anything is like squeezing blood from a stone."

The littlest of her children, 3-year-old Betty, finished off the
family's last dollop of porridge this morning. No one else in the
household has eaten in nearly a day,
leaving Rose unsure if the knot in her stomach is hunger, or anxiety, or
both.

She has not made as much as a cent today, and she's been sitting here
for more than two hours now. There have been luckless days when she's
gone home with nothing,
and it is that possibility that preoccupies her now. Eyes shut, hands
clenched tightly together in her lap, Rose bows her head in prayer.
Resurfacing, she is smiling
weakly, rejuvenated momentarily by faith, inspired by fear.

"If you are a mother," she is saying, her gaze fixed on the middle
distance, "you don't know what suffering is until you have watched your
babies go hungry. I have
suffered many times."

Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or the former Soviet Union,
surviving on less than $1 daily is like living in a time warp, a
universe of hand-to-mouth existences
wholly untouched by technology's advance, the Berlin Wall's collapse,
the torrents of cash flowing from one increasingly borderless country to
another in this new
epoch of surging global trade.

And nowhere has time stood as still as it has here: sub-Saharan Africa.

New Trade Policies

Following decades of colonial misrule and early experiments in
socialism, nearly 40 African governments have adopted laissez-faire
trade policies, submitting to the
so-called structural adjustment programs of the World Bank and
International Monetary Fund -- which reduce spending on public services
and increase privatization --
in hopes of attracting foreign investment and loans.

Yet while sub-Saharan Africa's 640 million people represent about 10
percent of the world's population, the region accounts for only 2
percent of all international trade,
less than it did during the last days of colonialism 50 years ago.

Zambia, a landlocked, butterfly-shaped nation of 10 million people, is
as poor as Africa gets. Eight of every 10 Zambians live on less than $1
a day. Ruled by British
mining concerns for more than a quarter-century, then colonized by the
British in 1924, Zambia won independence 40 years later.

For the 27 years that followed, President Kenneth Kaunda pursued
economic policies that joined government and the economy at the hip.
Daunting trade barriers,
massive state subsidies and onerous business regulations protected and
steered a fragile economy heavily reliant on a single commodity: copper.

Inefficient and unproductive, propped up by foreign loans and dragged
down by plunging copper prices, Kaunda's "humanist" system slid
inexorably into collapse. Fed
up with constant shortages of food and fuel and with Kaunda's
authoritarian leadership, Zambians forced their independence hero to
allow elections, then voted him out
in 1991 in favor of a trade union leader promising reform, Frederick
Chiluba.

Under Chiluba, Zambia eliminated tariffs on foreign goods, weaned
farmers off practically all government subsidies and support, and sold
more than 300 state-owned
enterprises, including the country's copper mines. Virtually overnight,
a socialist command economy had been replaced by a deregulated,
free-market model.

The payoff so far is an economy fueled by little more than grit and
guile, practically devoid of valuable commodities. Since 1992, Zambia
has shed nearly 100,000 jobs;
last month, mining giant Anglo American abandoned its attempt to make
its Zambian copper mines profitable, putting 4,000 jobs in peril. Less
than 10 percent of
working-age Zambians work full time in the formal sector, leaving the
jobless to sell whatever they can get their hands on at markets like the
one here in Maramba -- or
on the streets after dark. Police say prostitution has skyrocketed since
1992, especially in urban hubs such as Lusaka, Livingstone and Kitwe.

"You won't find many Zambians old enough to remember it who would want
to return to the Kaunda era," said Fred M'membe, executive editor of the
Post, an
independent newspaper in Lusaka. "But you won't find anyone who will say
that we're better off now than we were 10 years ago. No one alive today
has ever seen such
poverty. How do you run a modern economy when the vast majority of your
earners are taking home pennies a day?"

'Mama, I Am Hungry'

"It seems I just woke up one morning and everything was gone." Rose is
explaining how she got into the business of selling tomatoes.

That was four years ago, after her husband lost his job as a firefighter
when the government began restructuring the workforce. That was after
the last of the nearly 40
clothing manufacturers in Livingstone and Maramba shut down, unable to
compete with secondhand goods pouring in from Europe and the United
States.

What was she to do? She was a 40-year-old woman with a high school
diploma, with four children and another on the way. There was no work to
be had, so she did not
look. There was no dole, so she could not wait. There was no charity, so
she could not beg.

"If I cry or go to my neighbors, what good would that do?" Rose is
saying. "They have nothing either. They are suffering just as much."

Friends who had lost their jobs at the local textile factories had begun
selling vegetables and charcoal that they purchased from wholesalers.
Rose decided to join them.

The number of vendors at the Maramba market, which opened in 1952,
remained constant for nearly 40 years, then tripled over the next 10 as
unemployment swelled.

"My husband was dying along with the town," Rose is saying of her
husband's slow disintegration from kidney failure. He died a year ago, a
broken man in a broken
town.

"I think not being able to support his family is what really killed him.
He was a proud man. He hated not being the breadwinner. But it was the
only way we could make
it. All of my neighbors work here at the market. For most of us, it is
the only way to survive."

She is saying this when a lithe figure with braided hair and a
featureless, torn dress appears as if dropped from the sky, hurtling
into Rose's lap with playful fury.

"Mama, I am hungry," 10-year-old Ennelis is saying as Rose gathers the
girl up in her arms. It is the girl's summer vacation, and she awoke to
a house with no food.

"Then help me work," Rose is saying to her.

The girl is like a talisman today. Within 30 minutes of her arrival,
three customers appear at the tomato stand, forking out about 8 cents
apiece for a handful of the
medium-size tomatoes. Ennelis, who worked the vegetable stand alone for
three weeks last year when her mother was bedridden with malaria, rips
scraps of paper from
one of Zambia's independent newspapers, the Monitor. An editorial
laments the failure of Chiluba's economic policies. Ennelis wraps the
tomatoes inside.

Rose hates to count money during the day. She is afraid that there are
too many idle young men around waiting to snatch a day's revenue from
some unsuspecting
woman's hand.

So she usually hides the crumpled, faded bills underneath the plain,
white doily on her table. The newspaper provides Rose with both
something to do in between
customers and an idea of how business is going that day.

"If you are just reading bits and pieces of a story at the end of the
day, you have made good money," Rose is saying. "If you have a lot to
read at the end of the day,
then you have not made very much money. If I have used up most of my
newspaper today, I will be able to buy maybe two small bags of maize
meal, and that is all I
need to make me happy today."

Rose's Budget

Ask just about anyone in southern Africa what it means to go hungry, or
what constitutes a food shortage, and they will say they are without
"maize meal," or "mealie
meal," depending on the country. It is all the same thing: the region's
all-purpose staple, used to make porridge for breakfast and nshima for
lunch and dinner and any
meal in between.

Nshima -- called sadza in Zimbabwe, pap in South Africa -- is the color
of grits, the consistency of polenta. Zambians eat it with just about
everything. Sprinkled with
groundnuts, chopped okra or maybe just some sugar, it is a meal in
itself when little else is available.

"If you don't like nshima," said Judith Namakube, a vendor at the
Maramba market who sells oranges and other fruits, "you aren't Zambian."

Relatively speaking, Rose does better than many other Zambians. Her
husband left her with a two-bedroom home. She has no electricity,
relying on kerosene lamps and
candles for light, charcoal for heat and fire. But with a tap in her
back yard, she does have access to clean water, saving the time it would
take to fetch it from faraway
wells or dealing with waterborne illnesses such as cholera.

And Rose has been able to make the most of her meager earnings by
joining a relief agency project that provides small loans to poor
entrepreneurs. The money is not
much, maybe $20 every six months. But it tides Rose over in particularly
rough times, ensuring that she has a steady supply of tomatoes to sell.

"It is not a lot of money," said Joshua Tom, a project coordinator for
CARE, the U.S.-based relief agency that runs the microlending fund here.
"But it can mean the
difference between life and starvation for a lot of people here."

Living on $1 a day makes budgeting difficult, but also reduces it to a
few simple priorities.

Of Rose's profits from the stand -- roughly $12 to $18 per month -- half
goes for food. About $2 goes for the fees charged by Ennelis's public
school. She pays $2 a
month for water, another $1.50 in property taxes and 50 cents for the
government's health insurance plan. Whatever is left goes to pay off her
loan from CARE.

Health insurance for the whole family would cost double what Rose pays
for herself, so whenever other family members get sick and need to go to
the clinic, they
simply pretend to be Rose. That works fine for Rose and her four
daughters, but when her 20-year-old son came down with malaria last
year, employees at the local
clinic wanted to know how he came to be named for a woman.

"He told them that his parents really, really wanted a girl," Rose is
saying, dabbing her eyes while laughing at a rare triumph.

Water, education and health care were free during most of Kaunda's rule,
and it rankles her that she now has to pay for basic services.

"That's money I could spend on meat," Rose is saying testily. The family
eats meat only once a year, usually at Christmas when Rose splurges.
"It's rubbing salt in our
wounds to take jobs away from the people and then make them pay for
things they cannot afford because they're not working."

Another customer wanders by, followed by another maybe an hour later. By
3 p.m., Rose has earned a little more than half of what she needs to buy
two three-pound
bags of maize meal, meaning that the market's end-of-the-day rush will
make or break her. The few people in town with jobs usually stop at the
market on their way
home, but it's anyone's guess whether they will need any tomatoes or if
they will choose Rose's over those of the dozen or so other vendors who
sell them.

Still, Rose is feeling confident. Perhaps more important, she wants
Ennelis to feel confident, safe, to believe that she will have food
today.

"Children should not live with such grown-up worries," she will say
later.

So she gives the girl the equivalent of about 12 cents and sends her off
to buy vegetables for this evening's nshima. An act of faith.

"Pick out what you want to eat with the nshima and take them home for
you and your sister to chop," she is saying to Ennelis, whose right hand
is outstretched in
anticipation. She skips off happily.

Enough for Dinner

The market is a hive, snatches of color and sound and chaos that flit
across the landscape like reels in a movie: young men pushing
wheelbarrows; an old toothless man
holding a squawking chicken in a plastic bag; barefoot children weaving
through the vendors' stands, chasing one another; women squinting in the
sun from their
misshapen stools.

Rose is beckoning a boy to fetch her a cup of tea for a nickel. It has
been nearly 24 hours since she last ate anything.

"This is what I usually have for lunch," she is saying. "It settles an
empty stomach."

Then, a flurry of customers. Rose springs from her stool. A woman buys
one of Rose's biggest tomatoes for about 12 cents. A young man in a tie
buys another. A
woman who attends the same church as Rose palms three of the small ones
and hands Rose about 8 cents.

"Rose, I am skinny, but you are really getting skinny," she is saying as
Rose wraps her tomatoes in newspaper. "You are going to look as old as
me if you don't eat."

"This life we live makes us old before we are ready," Rose is saying as
she hands the package across the table.

The sun is setting when Rose returns to her stool and retrieves the
scraps of newspaper from underneath her table. She sizes up her
surroundings and, seeing no signs
of danger, pulls the wrinkled bills from underneath her doily. She melts
into her seat while she counts:

Three thousand nine hundred Zambian kwachas. About 97 cents. Rose is
smiling as she rises from her stool to go buy the maize meal that she
promised her daughter,
then start her 30-minute walk home.

"Ah," she is saying as she stretches her arms toward the sky, "today we
are rich."

                                                  © 2002 The Washington
Post Company