By Alexander Nkosi
Public domestic debt is around $10 billion, at K17/$ this is around K170 billion. Add the reported K36 billion VAT refunds to that, it goes beyond K200 billion. Tough decisions ahead! We need every kwacha today, otherwise we won’t have money to support new entrepreneurs as we still owe a lot of existing entrepreneurs whose businesses will collapse if we don’t pay them…but where do we get all this money?
We need to get back what was stollen from Zambians in the most efficient way possible. Assets seized while cases are in court won’t be the same by the time these cases are despised of, there will be so much depreciation/ loss of value. We still need to strengthen our systems and allow fast track courts get fully established and running efficiently before we can reach such a stage where we deal with these cases in record time. A good example is that if based on assessments we are targeting to recover assets worth K10 billion, as cases drag in court, the assets won’t be the same. If we seize a lodge, we won’t start running it until the case is disposed of.
What I would do is to study all the cases, assets involved and have profiles for each of the individuals involved. If individual X has 10 cases involving assets worth K200 million suspected to be proceeds of crime, I would target to enter into an agreements with him over 9 difficult cases worth K199 million so that it is recovered it immediately, without spending anything on further investigating and prosecuting the case which can be so costly. I would thereafter prosecute and jail him over the 10th case worth K1m. If I do this for other cases involving huge amounts, I will recover K9.8 billion now with less costs and use it and still end up jailing the offenders over a few other cases.
Are they protecting some people by not announcing the source? I don’t think so, if they want to protect people they would actually not even announce investigations they are doing or not even investigate at all. So while we might be concerned with what is being seen as ‘lack of transparency’ in announcing sources, they could have gotten valuable information which they are secretly further investigating and would not want to announce at this point for fear of disturbing investigations or even victimising people before they establish strong cases.
So it might be too early for us to judge, let us give it a bit of time and observe how things unfold.
I stand for recovery of what was stollen in the most efficient way and punishing ofenders. I fully support any legal method which results in this.