It has been common in our nation and many other poor countries to hear politicians continuously implore the people to "sacrifice". During Kenneth Kaunda's rule in Zambia, he continuously asked the people to "sacrifice" a little harder so that they could eventually attain prosperity "in the long term"; this was after he finished all the money the British colonialists had left him, and Zambia was now on a path to the worst poverty levels in the world. When the people of Zambia finally realised that their prosperity was never to come - sacrifice or no sacrifice - they got rid of Kaunda and elected Frederick Chiluba, a former trade unionist. The first thing Chiluba asked the people of Zambia to do was to "sacrifice". De ja vu! After ten years of disastrous Chiluban economic management and nothing to show for their sacrifice, "Zambians" "elected" a new president, Levy Patrick Mwanawasa (I can not explain the quotation marks in this sentence because the case is still in court!). And what do we hear now? Mwanawasa is asking the Zambian people to sacrifice, sacrifice, sacrifice - oh God!

This may come as a big surprise to many who accept every new political fad as true without critical analysis, but the whole thing of asking people to sacrifice for future prosperity is actually a false and misguided scheme: it doesn't work and it can not work. Whenever a leader asks people to sacrifice, it is because he has no correct answer to their economic problems. The call to sacrifice is the easiest thing you can do because it conveniently postpones the people's desire to judge your performance objectively in the present. It allows you the chance to continue enjoying a false sense of pride (and boasting) for what you have not achieved, it’s a substitute for effective thinking. In short, it is always nothing but a false promise based on false premises.

This year, our government asked the civil servants to "sacrifice". What this means is that they should not press for salary increments because of the economic hardships the nation is facing. If they ask for these salary increments, the IMF will not give Zambia the promised debt relief and so the nation will become poorer. It seems, therefore, that asking them to sacrifice is quite a reasonable thing to do.

The IMF are obviously happy to hear the government ask the civil servants to sacrifice and they are even happier when the civil servants comply. The reason they are happy is not because they are evil neocolonialists who want to see the people of Zambia suffer. Rather, the reason is that they too genuinely and sincerely think that this call to sacrifice is good for the nation. From their economic viewpoint, when salary increments are given to the civil servants, the nation will suffer because of the strain on the budget that this should trigger. The government does not have the money so they will have to either borrow more money (and cause interest rates to go higher) or raise taxes or submit to high inflation, all of which discourage investment, kill more jobs and increase poverty. In their sincerity, therefore, the IMF and the government believe that the call to sacrifice is logically right for Zambia. This is the same reason they apparently supported Chiluba's similar admonitions to sacrifice (which, incidentally, have materialised into nothing).

I wish to contend that there would be no need to ask people to sacrifice if the government pursued the correct economic policies. How can you ask a person who is not getting enough money for just feeding himself to sacrifice? Sacrifice what? The person is dying. It is meaningless. If a person is doing a job, he should be paid for it. It is immoral and unreasonable to ask him to forfeit the right pay that he deserves for his time and input. And besides, what will happen when the person later starts demanding his higher pay after the sacrifice period? Even if there is a positivistic chance that "sacrifice" has economic benefits, these will be reversed easily because people cannot realistically "sacrifice" for too long, without causing some political instability through social revolt (which also reverses any hope of establishing an attractive investment climate).

The correct moral and economic thing that government should have done, therefore, is to simply lay off all the people that they should not be paying in the first place. People complain about "ghost workers" on government payrolls, but even the "real" workers on that list are actually ghost workers. The truth of the matter is that most people employed in government (perhaps more than 95 %) are not necessary (and this includes Ministers as well) and whatever the government needs to achieve can be achieved with very very few people and very very few structures. But the problem is that government wants to do the wrong thing (of keeping these huge structures and jobs) so that they can have some temporary popularity with a few people instead of saving the larger economy by radically downsizing government. The few workers who will remain can then be paid what they will deserve since they will now be doing more work any way.

When these civil servants are laid off, the government will actually be doing them and the rest of the nation a big economic favour. The fact that government will not need to pay them any more means that there shall be a lower risk of having budgetary problems, which means that government shall not need to borrow much, which means that both taxes and lending interest rates at banks can be kept quite low. This is the sort of climate that will attract and promote investment, which will consequently help the people who are laid off from government in this exercise to quickly find other jobs. Admittedly, it might not be these same people who will find jobs, but logically, the total number of people employed in the nation should rise when a better investment climate is established. You do not need the IMF giving you conditionalities when you pursue such common sense strategies because whatever they want you to achieve will now even be more easily achieved. Instead of blindly following IMF, therefore, our government can set the pace for a much quicker economic growth process; a pace which, though more radical, would still be agreeable to both the IMF and the people themselves.

But where will the government get the money to lay off all these people? The money they budgeted for their salaries in the first place would help lay them off, and secondly, government has a lot of property which they can liquidate when they lay off so many of their workers since they will not need these properties any more. They can liquidate most of their cars, their houses, their buildings and so on. Add to this the savings in daily running costs that they would make as a result of closing down most of these jobs and irrelevant ministries and you have more than enough money to deal with the downsizing process. This will be good because these laid off people will not go out without enough money to sustain themselves as they wait for the economy to actually pick up as a result of these measures of cost saving. In this way, no one will be sacrificing anything since they will have some money and the remaining workers can also have reasonably increased salaries without causing a strain on the budget or the government's resources in any way. But even if the methods I have outlined for raising this money were not adequate, I would suggest that borrowing money for this purpose would be a much more viable investment for the Zambian economy than the other eventless borrowings that government does all the time. A lender could be more confident in this proposal because of the guaranteed logical implications it presents for the economy.

It is wrong to ask a human being to sacrifice his livelihood. If a man has worked for something, he has to be paid for it as per agreement. This is why I am not even in support of the current public demand for the MPs to sacrifice (or "postpone") their lofty mid-term gratuities. These people signed a contract concerning their gratuities when they came to parliament and they put in their effort on the understanding that they would be paid that amount of money at a specific time. Some of them probably even borrowed some money from the banks with the assurance that they would pay back this money at the time specified in the gratuity agreement. It is wrong to ask them to sacrifice their gratuity or even to postpone it; a contract is a contract. But the reason that people are asking them to do this is because the government itself has been asking the other people in the nation to sacrifice. They are the ones who have caused a problem where there was not supposed to be one and now they are being taken to task on their own word. These contradictions would not have come up if both the government and their advisors, the IMF, had realised that the "sacrifice" strategy is not only immoral, intrusive and eminently paternalistic, but it is also an economically unsustainable way of dealing with our problems.

Our problems will be solved when our government becomes bold enough to take the measures that they need to take concerning the size of government and its other sources of needless socialistic expenditures. The entire central government is able to operate with only two or three ministries and small departments representing functions that we might deem as absolutely necessary (these are very few).

Our good leaders disagree with this assessment even without attempting to analyse it, and so they are left with no choice but to regurgitate inferior strategies and promises that have already been used in the past and that did not work, with or without the IMF's approval. Instead of appointing an intelligent "task force" on such an important issue, to at least see if it makes empirical sense, all our leaders could do was to observe other poor nations in Africa that have equally gargantuan governments and somehow they concluded, quite irrationally, "they also have big governments, so we do not a need small government."

And yet they still ask us, through their countless audacious speeches, to “contribute alternative ideas to solving our economic problems”. Perhaps what they mean is people who will only tell them that they are already doing the right thing.

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