ABOUT AN UNRESPONSIVE AND MEANINGLESS RESHUFFLE
By Sean E. Tembo – PeP President
1. More than two years after forming Government, President Hakainde Hichilema has finally made the first reshuffle of his Cabinet by firing the Minister of Information and Media and replacing her with the Southern Province counterpart. But how meaningful is this reshuffle really?
2. When you are President of the Republic, a reshuffle of your Cabinet is supposed to address areas of weakness where you have failed to deliver to the expectations of the people. Any objective person who looks at Mr. Hakainde Hichilema’s Government will agree that the two key areas of weakness are the Ministries of Finance and Agriculture.
3. The Ministry of Finance has failed to grow the economy. It has failed to create employment. It has failed to stabilize key variables such as the exchange rate, inflation, prices of key production inputs such as fuel etcetera. The Ministry of Finance has failed to put a stop on over-borrowing, having grown our foreign debt from around $11 billion in 2021 to the current almost $15 billion, and having more than doubled our domestic debt from around K96 billion in 2021 to the current almost K207 billion. The Ministry of Finance has further shrunk our monthly withholding tax collections from the mines from an average of $400 million in 2021 to a paltry $80 million at the moment, because of its funny policies such as tax holidays and the swap deal of withholding tax for dividends made in 2022 with First Quantum Minerals, which was one of the major contributors of withholding tax among the mines. The Ministry of Finance has almost doubled the cost of living in the past two years, according to the JCTR (Jesuit Center for Theological Reflection) basic foods basket index, which has moved from around K5,000 for a family of six in 2021 to about K9,400 in 2023. Indeed, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Ministry of Finance is a failed Ministry, and if President Hakainde Hichilema was serious about addressing the plight of the Zambian people, his reshuffle should have covered this Ministry so that fresh blood is injected and we see what we can achieve as a country thereafter.
4. The Ministry of Agriculture is the second most chaotic and under-performing Ministry in Zambia. In the past two farming seasons that it has presided over since UPND formed Government, they have consistently failed to deliver farming inputs on time or in the right quantities or in some cases at all. The upcoming 2023/2024 farming season appears set to be a repeat of the 2022/2023 and 2021/2022 disastrous farming seasons, with their signature cancellation of fertilizer tenders repeating itself this year, all over again. The Ministry of Agriculture has failed to recapitalize Nitrogen Chemicals of Zambia in Kafue so that we can produce cheap fertilizer locally since we have all the raw materials here in Zambia, instead preferring to import the commodity at ridiculous prices as high as $1,000 per tonne. The end result has been that the cost of production for maize which is our staple food, is very high and when the farmer passes over that high cost of production to the consumer, the mealie meal becomes unaffordable to most Zambians since most people’s incomes have not only remained stagnant, but have dwindled due to inflation, thanks to another underperforming Ministry, the Ministry of Finance.
5. Therefore, any Cabinet reshuffle done by President Hakainde Hichilema, which does not address the underperforming Ministries of Finance and Agriculture, is superficial, meaningless and unresponsive to the needs of the Zambian people. The fact that the President decided to only reshuffle the Ministry of Information and Media and excluded the other two biggest non-performing Ministries, means that the President is not listening to the cries of the Zambian people when they say that the cost of living is unbearable. But perhaps it is not the Ministries of Finance and Agriculture which have been underperforming, but President Hakainde Hichilema himself. In which case, it is the duty of the Zambian people to reshuffle Mr. Hakainde Hichilema out of State House in 2026.
//END
SET 27.09.2023