POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO OUR DEVELOPMENT CRISIS
By Fred M’membe, President of the Socialist Party
No matter how many new mines we allow transnational corporations to open and how much they increase mineral production, we will not get much out of it and move our people out of poverty.
We need to learn something from what Indonesia has done with its minerals. They used to earn just over a one billion dollars a year exporting iron as an unprocessed commodity but they stopped and started producing stainless steel. And today Indonesia is earning billions from these value additions. But those who were benefiting from commodity exports and exploitation are not happy with them and are relentlessly fighting them.
We have been mining and exporting unprocessed minerals since the early 1900s but we have gotten very little, if not nothing, from it. We can learn from others and do the same thing Indonesia has done with our 2,400 metric tonnes of Cobalt, albeit a poor second to the Democratic Republic of Congo’s 24,000 metric tonnes production per year. We can do the same with our emeralds, nickel, uranium, etc.
And most of our North Western Province gold should be mined for government stock of gold reserves. There should be very little, or no, exports of gold. With increased earnings from these value additions to our minerals we can be in a better position to tackle our youth unemployment of around 7.5 million by pumping some of these increased earnings into agriculture, which is today in a crisis.
Today we have no less than 12 farming blocks, each of around 100,000 hectres of arable land laughing at us. We need only to determine the investment requirements for what we need locally and what the regions around us require over 10 years. And we shouldn’t bother about exporting to Europe, we should instead focus on our neighbours within Africa. And there’s need for us to reduce or stop the importation of foodstuffs we are consuming but not producing. We should as far as possible eat only what we grow and prioritize the growing of what we need to eat.
If we consistently, tenaciously and resolutely do this, Zambians should be able to see a huge reversal of fortunes in less 15 years. We have no sensible alternative to this.