Musokotwane borrows!- Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba
…he is the worst Finance Minister Zambia has ever had….
Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba wrote;
When Dr. Situmbeko Musokotwane took over from Ngandu Magande in 2008. He found a foreign debt of $500,000 as Zambia has just had a debt write-off of its $ 7 billion foreign debt.
Musokotwane also found earnings of $600 million from the mining sector due to the windfall tax policy on copper.
Without convincing justification, he also sold ZAMTEL, a giant telecommunications and communication service provider. Zamtel is now a shell of itself when competing private sector entities have grown and made billions of dollars in the last ten years.
By 2011, the foreign debt shot to $ 2.8 billion, and earnings from the mining sector dropped to negligible levels as he had abolished the windfall tax policy.
Musokotwane was borrowing for everything for roads, stadiums, and the infamous mobile hospitals.
Ten years later in August 2021 when he returned as Minister of Finance, he found a foreign debt of $11.9billion borrowed over a period of ten years( infact $9.1 billion since he left it at $2.8billion in 2011).
He has racked up the foreign debt to $14.7billion and rising.
He also found a local debt of K136 billion, which has shot up to K236 billion.
This year alone, Musokotwane informed Parliament that he is borrowing $ 600 million to support the 2024 national budget.
He has also put out an international notice that he is seeking $900 million in grants and loans for disaster and emergency support towards Zambia’s food insecurity.
He has already extended the IMF Bail-out loan from $ 1.3 billion to $ 1.7 billion. He has sought IMF approval already, and the fund has disbursed $ 570 million towards his request in July 2024.
Checking the records from Ministry of Finance, from his speeches and the National Borrowings Plans tabled and approved in Parliament, Musokotwane has borrowed in excess of $6 billion and rising barely three years since his return to the Ministry.
He found earnings from the mining sector of $1.1 billion per year since 2019 due to the non-deductible mineral royalty tax policy.
The revenue from the mining sector has dropped significantly to barely $300 million a year due to partly the abolition of the policy.
Pinning their hopes on Musokotwane is the fastest pathway to UPND’s their exit.
But similarly, President Hakainde Hichilema believes in granting tax concessions and unjustified incentives to the mines.
His hopes are also anchored in the IMF and its liberal policies.
Look at the Mopani Deal.
Look at the KCM deal.
Look at the First Quantum Minerals deal.
It is documented and audited that FQM stole $2.5 billion from Kansanshi Copper and Gold Mines.
ZCCM-IH started both criminal and civil court processes to recover the money and punish the Directors.
Together, Hichilema and Musokotwane have abandoned the court processes and have not provided a pathway to recover the $2.5 billion.
ZCCM-IH shares in Kansanshi have been sold and converted to an annual royalty payment.
These careless and dangerous decsions have been made at the time that Copper has been predicted to rise and rise and rise.
Copper is currently trading at $10,000 per tonne.
The economy is in free fall, has a volatile exchange rate market, rising inflation rate and debt, is experiencing the worst electricity load-shedding, has the the worst cost of living crisis on a bed of legacy issues such as poverty, high unemployment rate, diseases and under development with no discernible solution in sight.
Pray for Zambia, Pray for its recovery, Pray for a loyal and patriotic leadership.
We know you very well. Always distorting facts to support pief propaganda.
The man has out forth numbers above.
Dispute them with correct figures then conclude with your comment.
Just be civil and argue with more accurate figures
Mwamba is hired devil whose mission is to demonish HH. Knowing the chamc for him to bounce back in power is no more apart from pushing fake information just to impress his master. But that wont work, until you and your colleagues get diminished
Always factual Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba, and appreciated…but the tribal zealots will always condemn you and insult..They have a warped motivation..Just to have there own in power is everything … whether he does sh!t is no big deal…We are dealing with a weird species.
And Ambassador Emmanuel Mwamba can’t you research on what Muna Hantuba’s Aflife is doing with the $140million environmental consultancy contract empty head Kabuswe gave him… without any over sight at all! No monitoring or controls whatsoever!
If. Musokotwane was the worst finance minister Zambia has ever had, the late PF finance minister, MHSRIP, Alexander Chikwanda, would not have commended him when he presented the first PF budget. I wonder what financial know how Mr Mwamba has which surpases what the late and everyone else in this field had/has.
The truth could be Mr Mwamba is perturbed by good results from Musokotwane’s workings which may make it hard for his favoured party to gain majority voters’ recognition
Let us answer in an intellectual way the way Mwamba has tabulated data. Let us put authentic data so that as readers, we get the information and compare. I want figures for me to understand the issue not comments. I enjoy information with facts.
Let us be objective in our analysis and criticism. Musokotwane has done well to restructure the debt. However, he has a big big problem in managing the forex from mines. I don’t know what was going on in his head when he sacrificed 20% shareholding of Zccm-ih in kasansashi for 3% royalty when panama was rejecting a13% royalty from the same company. Hell not heaven knows why he abandoned the pursuit of 2.5bn usd stolen from Kansanshi to invest in Kalumbila. Zccm-ih has no shareholding in Kalumbila. Lastly, the incentives given to the same FQM to build enterprise nickel has created a 300m usd/per year blackhole in tax revenue. The exchange rate is volatile not because of dollarisation but because of hole intentionally created to pleas the white owners of FQM over national interests. And now the same man proposing to jail zambians for 10 years for using usd in local transactions. This might just cause the forex to even get scarcier as people will take it offshore. Here we are giving away our minerals and taxes to foreign entities and yet we go begging for loans from IMF. This practice of giving the minister of finance the leeway to waive taxes to mines must immediately. It is opaque and open to manipulation and possible abuse. Many former ministers ; Magande, Chikwanda etc have all made very strange decisions. Tax laws should be written in stone. If the investor doesn’t like them, let him leave the minerals in the ground. Finance mi isters must be stripped of powers to waive taxes at the whim of foreign entities. This disease of incentivising foreign entities with damaging tax waivers started with Anglo American in 2000. Let’s get rid of it. Chikwanda even hosted FQM directors at him home for a get together party. Who does that? We are not a serious people as a nation. We are jokers , just good at trading insults, violent politics and hating each other along tribal lines, womanising, imbibing alcohol and supporting English Premier league football teams.
By the same measure,Emmanuel Mwamba was the worst ambassador Zambia has ever had…
Situmbeko definitely has his faults but I wouldn’t call him the worst finance minister ever. That honor goes to Satana’s uncle Akexander B Chikwanda ABC who brought us into the worst economic situation and worst debt with the so called Euro bonds ever imagined.
Correct.
ABC must be given the award posthumously. Records are there right from the time of UNIP through to MMD under FTJ.