By Staff Reporter
Economic Front (EF) leader Wynter Kabimba says President Hakainde Hichilema is a danger to Zambia for having “a fetishism, religious belief” since he came from Bweengwa to Lusaka that money should be made at all cost to the detriment of the people.
Speaking with Daily Revelation, Kabimba said President Hichilema has tried to play the business trump card without realizing the consequences of that trump card, saying one of the first meetings he had was with the Millers Association of Zambia who complained to him about the PF’s regulatory framework on the export of mealie meal, with him answering that, “you are business people, you must be at liberty to make money.”
He said what he did not realize was that mealie meal and maize is a component of the national security of this country, saying for instance there was no way countries like Ukraine and USA could allow for the exportation of all the wheat because people have to make money.
“That’s a ridiculous argument and position for a head of state to take. Because you can’t make money by starving your people. You can’t allow your business people to make money at the expense of starving the citizens. So he fails to understand how mealie meal feeds into the national security of this country and yet there is a video clip coming from his own mouth where he said a hungry person is an angry person when he was in the opposition,” Kabimba said. “And he was right. He comes now into office he thinks that a hungry person must be a passive person as him and his colleagues in that business continue making money.”
Kabimba continued: “So he has this fetishism as we call it, this religious belief in money as a capitalist. That money should be money and should be accumulated to the detriment of the life of the people. That’s his understanding of money. He has this fetishism, it’s ingrained in his mind since he came from Bweengwa and he came into Lusaka to come and make money. He has internalized that as the only important aspect of a human beings life, to make money.”
He charged that that was where “he becomes a danger as head of state and the consequences now of that decision which he made is what you see now in the pricing of mealie meal.”
He said out of panic, the administration was telling the FRA to give cheaper maize to millers, when FRA bought the same from treasury resources at a huge cost.
“Secondly, how much quantity does FRA have? I don’t think it can even last this country three months. So we have like I said before a group of people that do not remain awake, they don’t stay awake at night to show that they have these mammoth problems on their hands. They keep on changing statements,” Kabimba said.
He said the UPND do not think that their word should be their bond, saying the ruling party had a manifesto which they marketed as a social contract to the Zambian people and even went further to condense that manifesto into a 10 point plan, saying his understanding was that the manifesto was a long term document to cover the five-year term while the 10 point plan was to deal with the short term challenges that they had analyzed as being on hand.
He said they knew about the load shedding which was going on and said to Zambians voluntarily that the load shedding was a problem they would deal with, including on the issue of the volatility in the exchange rate with the President saying that the Kwacha will appreciate on the very day of his inauguration because of the supposed international goodwill.
The issue of the pump price of fuel was explained against the claim that the PF administration was corrupt and had involved middlemen in the procurement of the commodity, which the President was going to remove, Kabimba said of the UPND promise.
He said Zambians were now judging the ruling party against the short term solutions which they had offered to Zambians, the basis upon which he said they were voted into office as the short term promises were exciting to the people.
Kabimba said it was sad now that the President was bringing in the five-year mandate argument as if they were going to resolve all the problems in their fifth year of office.
He said he had problems with the liberal economic explanations that come from economists, saying JCTR recently released the monthly food basked which he said was in the region of K8000 for a family of six and has come about as a result of increase in commodity prices, wondering how that should be if the inflationary figure is dropping and the Kwacha continued weakening against other major convertible currencies.
