By Staff Reporter
Former finance minister Ng’andu Magande says It’s expecting miracles to expect a government that has never been in power and is only three months old, to clear all the debt and arrest all the corrupt people, in a country “that was destroyed to the core.”
Speaking with Daily Revelation, Magande said what he saw during the PF reign was something he had never experienced before, saying it will take time to clear the mess.
“I have come to a conclusion that what Zambia has gone through the last 10 years, really is something that I never expected. Personally having worked outside the country, looking after 71 countries I only saw something like this in very few countries, where law and order just breaks down and people can do anything anyhow,” Magande said. “So to expect an opposition party which has never been in government to say in just three months now they should have already cleaned everything and cleared the debt I think it’s expecting something more of a miracle. It’s not easy.”
Magande said “Zambia has really been destroyed to the core”, by the previous administration.
“Some of the things that happened perhaps under the old man (Michael Sata) might not be corruption. But where you have so many contracts in one part of the country doing work, how do you say that is normal? And now you realise that some of the Infrastructure that was announced by the president it was not followed up by the same PF when president Lungu came up,” Magande said. “There is a road I hear I think Chama and I think somewhere in the north there, where the contractor started cutting up the hills, when the other president came in he didn’t follow up that project. But how much money was spent? So corruption is not changing of money it’s also doing projects which don’t make sense, not following rules.”
Magande said just because people had not seen arrests did not mean that there was no wrongdoing in the previous administration, saying he experienced the same serving under late president Levy Mwanawasa, that prosecuting corruption cases takes a long time.
He said just recently someone admitted to having received an upfront payment on the road works, but abandoned the project over arguments that it was agreed they would be paid extra amounts in the event the PF won.
“Do we expect him to be arrested alone or the accomplices, if those he worked with are to be rounded up? It will take a long time from what I experienced in government. To follow up these things doesn’t take a day because people start covering their tracks,” said Magande. “That guy on that Namwala road, whoever did that, today when he woke up he must have been doing something not to be mentioned as an accomplice. So this takes time I don’t think this is something that we should be saying ‘we want to see these people now (prosecuted)’, because there are a lot of lines followed in order to come to a conclusion to say yes here is where the K2 billion was deposited.”
