Dam It!
By Dickson Jere
At his invitation, I had a tête-à-tête with the President of Zambia Mr Hakainde Hichilema. Outside the main topic of our meeting, he digressed and discussed his development plans for the country – Province by Province – which mainly is anchored on the increased Constituency Development Fund (CDF).
He spoke passionately about water and sanitation, education and agriculture development. He stressed that “unity” in the country was his priority in order to achieve his plan.
He talked the talk.
I was interested to hear more about the Eastern Province – my homeland where I have also invested in farmland. I talked about my desire – for a longtime now to do cattle ranching – but for my laziness! Lawyering is taking up much of my time.
“Each time I fly over the Eastern Province, I see water everywhere. There is plenty of water in that Province,” the President said.
“But the water is going to waste. We need to build dams to capture that water for irrigation,” he observed, adding that he had asked his team to look into that project as matter of priority for the East.
As an agriculture dependent area, the Eastern Province needs to be producing crops throughout the year as opposed to rain-fed crops. Villagers in the Eastern Province are not very scattered but concentrated, which makes it easier to take development.
“I want to dam the Eastern Province,” he said, thrice, as way of emphasizing his point.
I agreed with his thinking and plan for the Eastern Province and the need to invest in irrigation system to supplement on seasonal rains. The famous Lunkwakwa stream of Chipata – which never dries – passes right inside my farm and yet non of us have damed it except the Gonda Barracks.
“But I hope the technocrats will not let you down on that. The project can be game changer for the province,” I said, while emphasizing that he should put up a team to spearhead it within his government.
Most projects fail to take off due to bureaucratic nature of our governance system.
“Even the current CDF disbursement system need more flexibility especially for rural areas,” I said, which he agreed and indicated that he was observing keenly on how it will play-out for now with the hope of tying the knots in the next round.
You see, Eastern Province does not have many big commercial farmers like Southern and Central Province but yet it produces a lot of cash crops through small-scale farmers.
Tobacco is one of the cash crop that has changed lives in Eastern Province and yet grown by villagers. We also have huge production of maize, soybeans, and sunflower in the Eastern Province.
Cotton used to be huge but production has gone down despite investors putting up ginnery in the province.
And, off course, the famous Chalimbana groundnuts!
I note that the President has somewhat renamed the “Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) to Agriculture Support Programme (ASP) in order to expand its scope beyond just giving input. Initially, it started as Fertilizer Support Programme under the MMD government but President Rupiah Banda changed its name and scope in 2009 to FISP in order to incorporate seed to go with fertilizer. We are yet to see what else will incorporated in the new scope of the program, which is subsidy driven initiative to support small scale farmers.
I hope the proposed project of damming the East will be a reality!