By Patson Chilemba
Economic Front (EF) leader Wynter Kabimba has charged that President Hakainde Hichilema’s incompetence to lead the country has been exposed in the last 10 months of him being in power.
Speaking with Daily Revelation on the fuel pump price which has increased by K12.42 for diesel and K8.63 for petroleum among others in just the 10 months President Hichilema has been in office, Kabimba described the President as a deceitful man who was determined to govern the country on the trademark of lies.
“So like we have said before, this is a man who is going to maintain himself in power purely on a trademark of lies. Purely on the trade mark of taking Zambians for granted. Purely on the trademark of thinking that he’s smarter than everybody else, and that what he says is divine and we just believe it,” Kabimba said. “The truth of the matter is that the last 10 months have exposed HH’s incompetence to run a nation. He might have been a successful businessman in his life, but certainly what this has done is to expose him completely as a man who is incompetent. Who can’t provide leadership to his ministers, who cannot provide direction and everything is just falling apart.”
Kabimba said Zambians have started seeing through President Hichilema’s “lies now.”
He said President Hichilema should not hide in the war in Ukraine, arguing that the price of fuel started going up immediately the UPND government was elected into office.
“And if you remember we reminded him many a time; where are the middle men that you were talking about when you were in the opposition that they are the cause of the high price of the pump price of fuel? Where are they? Why haven’t you removed them? Because that was his argument,” Kabimba said. “He comes into office, he doesn’t get back to the Zambian people to tell us whether or not those middle men do exist. Just like he has never told us where those ghost suppliers at the Ministry of Finance whom he announced are. What we see is an increase, a regular increase in the pump price of fuel. And him looking for all sorts of excuses under the sun for his incompetence and the incompetence of his government.”
Kabimba said he does not remember the price of fuel having been this high in Zambia since he was born, arguing that adjusting the pump price of fuel upwards was one of President Hichilema’s first acts on assuming office, months before the war in Ukraine started.
He laughed at yesterday’s ZNBC main news broadcast, which he said started with a segment announcing that the inflation rate had reduced to single digits in three years to 9 percent, and that they put in one or two segments in between before announcing that the pump price of fuel had been adjusted upwards against.
Kabimba said during the same broadcast, ZNBC brought in an economist “who was quite cagey in his analysis” when he said that the prices were expected to come down with inflation going to single digits, but in the same breath said the rise of fuel prices was likely to trigger difficulties and send inflation upwards again.
He said he genuinely believed that the inflationary figures were being manipulated downwards as there was no correlation between the rate going down and the prices of goods which were constantly going up.
“There is no way you can have inflation going down and prices going high. Prices have always been going up and up in the last 10 months,” Kabimba said.
He further observed that whatever appreciations were being noticed in the Kwacha, which he said has appreciated against the South African Rand, were being swallowed up by South African goods which dominate the Zambian market.
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