Local Government Financing Framework : A Perspective Review of Zambian Local Governments

It has taken so many years now to undertake comprehensive assignment of revenues and assignment of expenditures to the local authorities in Zambia because of non-existence of a sound local government financing framework. Critically, it is naïve to think that local government transfers system is the perfect and finisher to the fiscal constraints faced by councils'. In recent years, the reality to grant fiscal autonomy and authority to local governments since 2002 has however failed to resolve the financing arrangements even when formal decision was made by then Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) government to implement the decentralization policy. Notably, it is now thirteen (13) years since the decentralization policy was formulated but the process has been slow towards a more comprehensive approach of fiscal empowerment of councils. However, there is no doubt to state that decentralization is essentially a political process and not an end to itself. Obviously, the failure to assign additional revenues to local governments especially those that are not politically difficult to collect and coupled with declining own revenue sources have created enormous problems of fiscal imbalance between rural and urban councils'. In Zambia, fiscal autonomy is not the easiest policy option because assignment of revenues is a very difficult dimension of decentralization reforms regardless of the politics at play