By Hon. Bowman Lusambo
IT’S ALL ABOUT LEADERSHIP
This week, Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta signed a supplementary budget for the fiscal year allocating an additional 35 billion shillings (roughly €250 million) for the country’s fuel subsidy program.
In Rwanda, the government further adjusted its fuel subsidy intervention to cushion Rwandan consumers against increased cost of living.
In South Africa, from January, energy subsidies more than tripled from 2017 to stand at ZAR 172 billion (USD 10.4 billion).
This month, Nigerian Finance Minister Zainab Ahmed announced that she will tap US$ 2.2 billion to help fund petrol subsidies.
The world over, UNDP estimates that an astounding US$423 billion annually is spent to subsidize fuels for consumers.
In all these conversations, leadership is being epitomized.
Sensible leaders are taking charge by stepping in and ensuring that their country’s poorest are protected. Ours are blaming everything and everyone for their failure to act.
Down here, we have a leader who conveniently wants to blame his failure to provide leadership on all manner of global factors. He sends his Press Secretary to parrot some gibberish that even my grandmother in Masaiti cannot even understand and yet her bus fare just went up.
We are in this predicament because our self anointed Economic Manager is in sixes and sevens. He has no idea whether he is going or coming. We warned Zambians that Hon. Situmbeko Musokotwane & Co. have surrendered our economic sovereignty to the boys and girls in Washington and they are the ones rushing the show, we only have Zombies for Ministers who can’t even act.
Admittedly, they don’t have headroom to act. This is a consequence of poor foresight.
The first act of this government was to allocate a hefty tax holiday for the mines in a period that even a small Jerabo in Kitwe knows is a time for record high copper prices. In a time when Zambia should be cashing on a windfall from the mines, we are left scrambling for scraps.
In their thinking, our leaders gave their western capitalists mining investors tax holidays in order to attract fresh large scale investments in the mines, as we speak almost 9 months later, there has never been a single dollar brought in the sector.
In no time, Zelensky and Putin will sit and talk, the war will be over but we can assure the Zambians that our economic fortunes will be far from over. After Ukraine-Russia conflict, this team of failures will jump on another global issue to blame for their obvious ineptitude.
It should be stated here that there has never been a time when the world ever fell as silent as the grave, there is always some issue brewing somewhere and our new friends in government ought to understand this. The late Rupiah Banda presided over record GDP growth rates at the height of the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. Our beloved Edgar Chagwa Lungu was confronted with the worst climate change crisis and the pandemic but as the latest ZamStats figures have shown, he managed to steer the ship to an impressive 3.6 GDP growth in 2011.
So what’s the excuse? It’s plain incompetence on the part of those governing the nation today. As they still bask in the glory of their victory of August last year, we wish to warn them that there has never been a leader in the history of the earth who has managed to rule over hungry people, even Moses had to ask God for Manna for the starving Israelites.