Government should improve on communicating changes in policies!
By Kelvin Chisanga
It’s good to note that in the last few years Zambia has seen some strong fortitude of commitment on a number of policy structures and framework.
This further facilitate a conducive appeal as right conditions for escalated interest in attracting quantifiable business investment and processes which can strongly attest to driving productive investment appetite, especially pulling efforts in most key enabler sectors backing Zambia’s primary resource sectors.
The call for practical policy translation should be, as this has been holding so strong of a voice out there, and this further demands for an inclusive formation structure with multi stakeholders’ involvement within policy formulations as this can form a strong baseline factor to work out intended policy objectives at early stages of policy discourse.
Zambia is coming from a background where there were some serious policy inconstancies which made certain key priority sectors to underperform due to lack of serious intersections and consistency on policy framework, compounded with mismatch on the actual grounds like the case of Small Medium Enterprise (SME) policy in particular, two different factors of interest do speak on this policy instrumentation.
The shadowboxing of policies even on key essential sectors took this country backwards, taken an instance in the mining sector where we have had some policy changes for more than 15 times in the circle of 10 years, made clearly a certain misnomer to this economy and has since clearly shown strong impediment towards and against projected growth patterns in the recent past years, which led to Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) beating Zambia in copper productions.
I think it’s very much critical to state that the government should engage more stakeholders in communicating changes or adjusted as being done in policies and should make policies more clearer in communication so that the economic agents and the general public at large can easily translate the goodwill and effect infuse in certain policies especially those with growth driven incentives.