By Staff Reporter
Hakainde Hichilema is a joker, he doesn’t understand how to govern a nation, says FDD leader Edith Nawakwi.
And Nawakwi said President Hichilema missed the Russia-Africa summit because he is USA President Joe Biden’s stooge, and wanted to please his master by staying away.
Speaking with Daily Revelation, Nawakwi said people must not take President Hichilema seriously when he claims that the price of mealie meal will stabilise once measures he said he has put in place were effectualised.
“He’s a joker. He doesn’t understand how to govern a nation. Prices of mealie meal don’t stabilise from the sky where he is flying like a butterfly everyday,” Nawakwi said. “Prices stabilises by any leader sitting down with his people and making a concrete plan which has achievable targets like how much maize is going to be produced this year. So it’s not about waking up from slumber and say the price of mealie meal is going to stabilise. We just look at him as a joker. And we are getting irritated … and he’s agitating people.”
Nawakwi said there was no way today in Zambia with the crisis that are happening that a President could go for a working holiday to his farm, when the prices of mealie meal and fuel are skyrocketing and people dying from lack of drugs in hospitals.
“There is absolutely no way you can be travelling like a butterfly when every little cob of maize in the bush is being gotten out and you have the audacity to even say that you have signed a contract with Congo. What type of a leader is he?” Nawakwi asked. “I am disappointed that here is a young man given the opportunity to change the matters in the country but he has completely messed up. This person can’t plan. When he’s not flying he’s attending to his goats. He has no time to spend in the office.”
Nawakwi said the President has no time to think, in the same manner as a butterfly which keeps flying from one tree to the other.
“Running a nation requires you to think, to plan, to talk to people, to see how people are suffering with wheelbarrows,” Nawakwi said, saying even the issue of street vending required to be handled with order, which she said government must create and not just bundling people from the streets. “You don’t descend on your people with a hammer. You go there with empathy.”
And Nawakwi said former Development Bank of Zambia chairperson Noel Nkhoma must be arrested for running the institution down while he was being paid for his time at DBZ.
“It’s the same story of looting,” Nawakwi said, saying when she succeeded the late Ronald Penza as minister of Finance, she found her late colleague had taken a cab-memo to cabinet to sell off DBZ, Zambia State Insurance, NATSAVE and other institutions but she urged cabinet to rescind the decision.
She said she demanded that DBZ collect money from all who owed the institution and worked out an arrangement with the borrowers to pay and $12 million was raised through the same system.
“Now what was Noel Nkhoma doing all these two years as chairman to just come out and say no, it should have been closed a long time ago. What was he doing getting commissions there, getting board fees?” Nawakwi asked. “Yes, there are people who have borrowed but there are some of us who had submitted proposals which met all the conditions and paid all the fees including arrangement and what not. Up to this day, they have never disbursed money. They need to pay us back because we are creditors.”
She said she wanted “this big mouthed (Southern Province minister Cornelius) Mweetwa” whom she said told the world that she owed BDZ K80 million, daring him to repeat the same statement.
“They use their mouths like diarrhea. Now they have a record of who owes who, what is owed,” Nawakwi said.
She said she wanted her money back through the Bank of Zambia for all the arrangement and other fees she paid to DBZ.
Nawakwi charged that someone was being lined up to buy the DBZ building and urged Zambians to remain watchful on who that one will be, including the other associated activities involving DBZ.
“These are the same people who were advising the government at that time. Now they are in government. Now they still have the same agenda. If there is a debt that is delinquent and people have borrowed let us collect that money,” Nawakwi said. “They are looking at NATSAVE. They are looking at State Insurance. They are looking at ZAMSEED. All those companies I served from the jaws of privatisation and liquidation. So now they are back at it. So what was Noel Nkhoma doing at the Bank for the Bank Governor to walk in and say ‘useless, you are doing nothing?’ People like that should just be taken to jail. And how many people did the Bank collect commitment fees and arrangement fees and not disburse money and what is going to happen to that money?”
Nawakwi said she paid K400 million (equivalent K400,000) now and was supposed to get $2.5 million commission from a factory for Legana sausages imported from Europe and other associated benefits.
She said she was dealing with a similar issue today at CEEC where someone borrowed her title deeds but they have been sitting on it for the past two years, saying the only person was that the person involved was related to Nawakwi.
And Nawakwi said the travel-friendly Hichilema only missed out the Russia-Africa summit because he wanted to please “his master Joe Biden.”
“He’s a stooge of Joe Biden. But he’s naive. He doesn’t know that if he meets Putin, Putin can easily put in a word to China to meet him quickly so that he doesn’t have to wait a long time, especially that he is near China by going there,” said Nawakwi. “The same Russians restructured our debt when I was Finance minister for the Mig 72s from Russia.”
