MY TAKE ON THE PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS TO THE NATION THIS AFTERNOON
By Sean Tembo – PeP President
1. The President said he will allocate more resources for relief food. However, he failed to specify how much exactly will be allocated for this purpose. Is it K3 billion, K5 billion or K10 billion? Without being specific, the President’s statement does not mean much and is empty rhetoric.
2. Requesting farmers to plant now and use irrigation? Where will the water come from? The previous Government had a program to build dams across the country, why has the current administration halted this program?
3. FRA community sales of maize has commenced in Livingstone where mealie meal price is K320 and not Eastern Province where mealie meal is K460 per bag in Lundazi. Why the inconsistency?
4. Inherited a huge debt using what measure? Because the rate of debt contraction of $3bn per annum by UPND administration is far higher than that by previous regime. If the previous regime was borrowing at the rate the UPND administration was borrowing, the external debt upon leaving office would have been $26 billion and not $11 billion that it was in August 2021.
5. All finance and economic crimes to be prosecuted within 5 months per new laws passed? That will undermine the fight against corruption instead of enhancing it. If the magistrate or accused persons are sick and unavailable for trial, the jurisdiction of the court will be challenged after the expiry of the prescribed 5 months period, hence undermining the delivery of justice.
6. Government will aggressively stimulate irrigation? No specificity. How are you going to do that? What specific Programmes are you going to implement? Without specificity this remains mere rhetoric.
7. Using first class for short flights like to Johannesburg is pretentious behavior? But what about using a private jet the way you do when going to Johannesburg and Windhoek, Namibia, isn’t that also pretentious behavior?
8. The main reason we are panicking so much about this drought is because we do not have sufficient maize stocks in reserve. In fact we have less than 200,000 metric tonnes against an annual consumption of 1 million. One of the reasons we do not have sufficient stocks of maize is because Government sold most of our maize to DRC even when the information about the drought was publicly available. In the premises above, is it not reasonable for the Zambian people to expect an apology from the President for the poor decisions of his Government?
///END
SET 29.02.2024