“There’s a thin line between clever and stupid…”

Okay, this tardiness is getting ridiculous, so I’ll give you a brief rundown of the reasons:

1. My car was smushed in an accident, and I’ve been dealing with the insurance company for about two weeks, sending stress levels sky-high. They should be taking the car away for repairs tomorrow. Yes, it took that long.
2. I’ve had a minor iTunes disaster. Somehow, a friend of mine who was borrowing my laptop has managed to delete the folder (“My Music”) that seems necessary to run iTunes. If anyone knows how to resolve this, I will be extraordinarily grateful.
3. Two of our major donors are preparing their assistance strategies for Malawi, requiring significant input from my division.
4. At the same time, we’re completing two major documents, one of them being the strategy I’ve been banging on about incessantly, and the other being a report looking at donor activity over the last fiscal year.
5. Malawi reached the HIPC completion point about two weeks ago.

* * *

This last one is the big news. HIPC stands for Heavily Indebted Poor Country, and reaching the HIPC completion point was probably the most significant event in Malawi’s economic history since independence. This is not an exaggeration.

Basically, under the HIPC framework, the Government of Malawi agreed to a number of structural and economic reforms, and to keep to relatively strict standards of fiscal prudence. Our adherence to these conditions was closely monitored, and once we had met them, with the exception of a couple of conditions we were granted clemency from, we were rewarded with a massive amount of debt cancellation. The main point of the whole exercise was to ingrain fiscal prudence into the Ministry and, once this and a couple of other structural targets were achieved, to reward Government with a huge amount of debt cancellation.

With the completion point reached, our debt burden, unsustainable and the source of a large volume of interest payments, was rendered relatively manageable at a stroke. This is obviously an extremely good thing for a poor country. At the same time, it provides us with the ultimate test of the durability of our new-found prudence in matters of external borrowing: reaching the HIPC completion point has widened the range of loans we are eligible to contract, in terms of the creditor and in the terms of the conditions of the loan. In the words of one of my colleagues ‘this scares me. Deeply.’

You see, as Spinal Tap so memorably put it, ‘there’s a thin line between clever and stupid’. It’s one thing maintaining the discipline required to stop contracting new debt when you’re barely allowed to look suggestively at a potential creditor, but its quite another when those same creditors are banging on your door, queuing up to lend you money. What we need as a matter of urgency is a clearly articulated policy on the contracting of new debt, the drafting of which will fall to my division. One might legitimately ask why this hasn’t been done already. After all, completion point wasn’t a sudden occurrence. The answer, inevitably, is muddy. A policy was drafted about two years ago, since when politicking and staff turnover have conspired to keep it unimplemented. To avoid these problems this time around, we need to start the whole thing again. It’s going to be a long process, with much consultation, much drafting and redrafting and many, many arguments.

So don’t bet on a timely Ramble any time soon.