Zambia has now found herself together with other southern African nations in the heat of Western "economic blackmail" as embodied in a US African Growth Opportunity Act (AGOA).

The AGOA is an economic framework that advocates conditional establishment of comprehensive macro-economic, political and social structures in all African states able and willing to export manufactured goods and services into the American market without any limitations on the quantities and free of tariffs.

However, it remains a huge question whether these proposed macro reforms would really spur our economies towards competitiveness and prosperity considering the daunting Western competitive bigotry in the global market.

Is our government aware of the western gambit about these trade agreements? Have we seriously bothered to examine long-run economic and political implications?

Our economy is factor-driven with exhaustible natural resources and unskilled cheap labour. These and other factors including physical, administrative, technological infrastructure directly lead to sluggish diversification and privatisation.

Upgrading the above structures alongside micro reforms at local entrepreneurial industry levels, should create a global competitive edge for our domestic market.

According to Michael E. Porter, to support rising prosperity, companies must transform their ways of competing. The types of competitive advantages a nation's companies enjoy must shift from comparative advantage (low-cost labour or extraction of natural resources) to competitive advantage with more productive methods.

Is Zambia ready to reform and liberalise its economic regimes at full-throttle in pursuit of globalisation?

Are there guarantees given to the rate of diversification into non-mining sectors? Do we have robust and well developed micro fundamentals to set the right context for global productivity and competitiveness?

Do we have rough and ready plans and strategies to link the gaps in the progression stages of economic development?

Factor-driven economies like that of Zambia are sensitive to global economic cycles, product price patterns and exchange rate movements. Therefore, it would be difficult for our exports to command a sustainable price tag in the global markets.

Given this predestined fact, our government should bargain from a defensive market position by continuously reviewing its trade policies and regulations.

In addition, the government, through heavy investment in efficient infrastructure and speedy acquisition of hi-tech production methods at industry level, is supposed to create prosperity.

Zambia has to urgently subscribe to an innovation driven stage before our mineral resources are over and done with.

For us to be winners, in spite of rough roadmap towards globalisation, we need leadership endowed with innovation, creativity, determination and compassion for the majority of Zambians who are presently living in abject and dreadful poverty.

Western economies will continue to cash in on our cheap labour and exhaustible natural resources under various trade agreements. The Americans know that macro reforms alone will not bring about global competitiveness and prosperity for African countries including Zambia. So why not bargain defensively with caution?

From the early 1800 to 1964, we were under the British rule. During that time they set up mines to mine copper, which at that time was fetching a good price on the international market.

Prior to that, there was the slave trade, which took away the cream of our men and women to be used in the most despicable manner too painful to describe here, but beneficial to the West at the expense of Africa.

Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) never benefited in any meaningful way but cosmetically, because resources were externalised at will.

The federation was brought in with the intention of raping us further by consolidating their stranglehold on the three countries (Two Rhodesias and Nyasaland) when the British saw that this was not going to work because of our resistance to the federation, they started transferring our resources to Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) even the Central Bank was cynically situated there to perpetrate this policy.

After Independence, the colonial masters still maintained a political and economic stranglehold on us, because the financial systems that they put in place both bilateral and multilateral were such that we had no say but had to toe the line, this is the case up to this day.

Then came the fall of the Soviet Union, who were the lonely voice that was supporting the third world countries at these international fora leaving us at the mercy of the West.

First and foremost, in the period highlighted above, there was only one meaningful secondary school (Munali in Lusaka) how ironic it is that the same people are now telling us how important education is, even our friends, the Irish, were telling us the same last week.

There was no hospital to talk about except one (Kitwe Central), there were no roads to talk about except one from Lusaka to Chingola. Agriculture was not developed.

How do you expect the people to earn income if they are not productive especially that formal employment was reserved for settlers?

As if that was not enough, the West decided to side with the settlers in the whole sub-region against the indigenous hence the liberation wars.

This was, indeed, costly in both human and economic terms. At independence, we had to make massive investments in infrastructure in order to improve the quality of life of our people. This came at great cost amid difficult conditions orchestrated by the West and their agents. Can you wonder why Zambia is poorer today than it was at independence?

The foreign policy of the West has always been that they do not care who the friend of a third world country is, and they would go out of their way to destabilise any country, as long as that country is not friendly to them.

This time around, we shall call their bluff, because the enemy of your enemy is your friend. We, the people, are going to lobby our Government and the civil society to start lobbying the friendly countries like India, Iran, China, Kuwait, Libya and Russia, to name but a few, as a South to South cooperation strategy since with the West we are not getting any where but getting poorer by the day.

After raping us for these centuries, don’t you think that even out of your own Christian charity, let alone our demands, total debt cancellation is in order?