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Hanpower Survey which was held shortly after independence (GRZ 1966), documented in some detail the extent of the manpower constraint faced by Zambia at that time. It can be seen from the Table that the vast majority of the 236,000 Africans then employed had had little or no formal schooling, and that less than one per cent of them had had five years of secondary schooling or more. Over the following two decades, however, the educational expansion initiated soon after taking office by Kaunda's United National Independence Party was to alter this educational profile sharply. Table 7 shows that by 1983 over 20 per cent of Zambian employees had at least 'O' level (secondary. Form 5) qualifications, and that about half had had some secondary schooling. These were major achievements for a country which, twenty years earlier, had inherited a school system which was so thoroughly inadequate in both quantitative and qualitative terms.

Nevertheless, this progress fell far short of meeting the needs of the formal sector for the full range of technical and professional skills, and a substantial number of non-citizen skilled workers had to be employed throughout the period. This was in spite of the fact that rapid localisation of the labour force was assigned high political priority soon after independence. A fairly complex set of regulations was established, requiring the satisfaction of strict criteria before work permits for expatriate personnel could be issued by the Ministry of Labour. Foremost amongst these was the production of satisfactory evidence by an employer that no suitably qualified or experienced Zambian was available for the job in question. Under these circumstances, a good indicator of the extent to which skill shortages amongst the Zambian labour force have remained important is provided by trends in the employment of non-citizens. Table 4 shows that the total number of non-Zambian employees remained approximately constant from 1964-76, although their proportional importance declined from 12 per cent to 9 per cent of formal employment over those years. Thereafter, however, the number of expatriate workers dro,pped sharply, such that by 1984 only 14,000 (less than half the earlie) levels) remained, accounting for less than 4 per cent of formal employment.

This aggregate picture of good progress with localisation is, however, misleading in a number of ways. First, in one important sense, the 'gap' is even smaller than it appears in Table 4, in that approximately half of the non-citizens currently employed are Zambian residents, mainly originating from other African countries, who, from a labour market viewpoint, can be treated as being equivalent to citizens since they are unlikely to face official pressures to leave.3 On the other hand, in a different sense, the progress with localisation has been less satisfactory than the table appears to indicate: although large numbers of non-citizens left Zambia after 1975, not all of those workers were replaced by adequately qualified and experienced Zambians. Many of their jobs remained vacant. This was particularly so for those expatriates who vacated professional and technical jobs after 1985 and who left the country primarily because they faced declining real incomes in the face of the Kwacha devaluations which occurred. By 1987, the situation in the health sector was particularly serious, with large numbers of foreign doctors having left Zambia, without replacement by either Zambian or expatriate personnel (see below). In addition, the aggregate quantitative picture hid qualitative problems in the labour market which affected most