IMMEDIATE KEY SOLUTION TO OUR ECONOMIC CHALLENGES
The key immediate positive economic measure that Mr Hichilema and his UPND government should take to address our economic challenges is revising the generous mining tax waivers given to transnational corporations.
Those in power should keep in mind that right now, the country is engulfed in political upheaval and is tense politically. Economically, our country is on its knees.
Aside from debt, the economic landscape is in the negative with high cost of living, which has a potential for civil unrest. Prolonged load shedding is negatively affecting business.
Low crop harvest has the potential to exacerbate inflation and exchange rate risk.
New external borrowing, even if we say it’s concession borrowing, is nonetheless increasing our foreign debt exposure and increases the probability for future default. Revamping of mines and increased copper production is a medium-term initiative and will not have an immediate impact on our economic challenges.
Our advice on the immediate positive economic measure is revising the generous mining tax waivers. We ask those in power to move on this immediately.
Fred M’membe
Mr Socialist is too elementary in providing an economic solution to the debt.
Sometimes when a leader is used to sarcasm,it becomes very difficult to offer a sober advice.
Fred cannot allow a day without deriding HH.
He is an epitomy of a malfunctioning robot.
Overtaxing a sector does not increase revenue for the government but rather kills the sector in the long run and eventual loss of revenue from the sector. Such kind of thinking is what caused the problem we currently having in the mining sector where the government wanted to milk the mining sector which as a result caused dwindling of investment in the mining sector.
I don’t know why we don’t learn from our past mistakes, for instance, in 2011, DRC was producing around 520 thousand tons of copper while Zambia was at 850 thousand but 12 years later by 2023, DRC produced 2.5 million tons which is almost 5 times the output in 2011 while Zambia only produced 698 thousand in the same year which is a drop of over 160 thousand tons. Surely this should tell us that we have been doing something wrong in the mining sector. If our neighbour’s copper production output has been increasing exponentially while ours has been declining significantly then we should have changed our approach to the sector but alas Mr. Mmembe want to continue on the path which has brought us where we are now.
That’s a sober positive check and balance and mature tone article always expected of you! And not those hate tonely write ups I desist reading to the end.