Staff Reporter
I don’t want to hear this nonsense of jobs, jobs, jobs from the Hichilema administration, says opposition FDD leader Edith Nawakwi.
And Nawakwi said by increasing the number of beneficiaries for the Social Cash Transfer programme, President Hakainde Hichilema’s administration is admitting that they do not have a plan on how to reduce poverty.
Calling in to Daily Revelation, Nawakwi said the administration was creating incentives galore for foreigners in the mining industry and farm blocks, and not incentives in places like Nakonde to provide for cassava plantation, saying she wants to see a programme where young people are not being rounded up to tell them that they can form a cooperative and get K12,000 and buy two chickens to start rearing chicken.
She said she wanted to see programmes where young graduates will be taught “in incubation camps” on how to run businesses and then supported to run the same businesses.
“I don’t want to hear this nonsense of job, job, job, because a job doesn’t get you to be a rich person. You are just a worker, you are a slave,” Nawakwi said.
She said she did not understand how the country would be planning to increase the Social Cash transfer, as that technically meant that they were accepting that poverty levels in the country will continue to increase.
She said the UPND administration was accepting that they were doing nothing to eliminate poverty.
Nawakwi said people were praising the Social Cash Transfer but they were not looking at the opposite, saying she would welcome a programme which envisioned a reduction in the number of beneficiaries in anticipation that the economy would improve and thereby graduating more people from poverty.
She argued that in Brazil, former president and current presidential aspirant Lula da Silva had a programme of getting 500,000 people every year from extreme poverty to middle income and they worked out a criteria for that.
“I would have thought that the farm blocks be a platform for graduating people from being extremely poor to some level of income sustainability,” Nawakwi said, and that people must not be given fish but a fishing rod to catch the fish. “So this international scheme of saying social welfare is the answer to the extremely poor in fact is a recipe for keeping them into that poverty bracket in perpetuity. So we need as a country to have deliberate schemes…they say that those that are on Social Cash Transfer will not access inputs, isn’t it? So it means that if I am on Social Cash Transfer I am on it in perpetuity and there is no escape from it and that’s a fundamental flaw in the budget.”
Nawakwi said incentives have been offered to the mines from the very moment Cecil Rhodes stepped his banditry feet here on the Zambian soil, as there have been seasons of boom and scarcity but the country did not manage to get even a quarter of the countryside developed.
She said what would create money is not offering more incentives to the mines but to offer incentives to all the sectors, for instance if the government removed duty on tractors and earth moving equipment that would spur developments in the agricultural sector.
“What is the incentive for water harvesting for example? They are putting broad words but no specifics. I would expect that we define what our problem is, we have adverse climatic conditions. The solution is that we need water conservation, construct as many dams as we can, and government has no money so you can give people rebates to bring earth moving equipment,” Nawakwi said. “Why just say the mines? Because the mines will get their bulldozer but the person who is doing dam construction will not get the rebate on their equipment. But it’s the same equipment. And if you say you can bring earth moving equipments tax free, you will see that a lot of people have some resources will begin to bring that equipment then with CDF people can actually do feeder roads.”
Nawakwi said there was too much emphasis on the foreigners, but the foreigners would make money and take it outside Zambia, like the happenings in the Gamestone industry.
She said in countries like Tanzania, Tanzanians were building Sky scrappers as Tanzanians but here in Zambia “even the former first lady going to Mongu they say can you prove that this car is yours. You know that kind of nonsense, where to be a Zambian is a curse?”
“How on earth can you ask Esther Lungu that that car is hers in which she is traveling? Is that normal? I think abantu ukulanda muchi Tonga, basontoka, they are mad. Basontoka, they are mad they need to be taken to Chainama. The ones who are doing this kind of nonsense to try and humiliate others to say if you have a shoe it’s not yours, prove that it’s yours. That is madness,” said Nawakwi.
She said former president Edgar Lungu went to Tanzania and got the country cashew nuts, President Hakainde Hichilema could as well get the country macadamia seedlings as they are locally very expensive.
“Can we do some programmes for young people which make sense, not to say and as am very disappointed of the ministers budget, because they are saying stabilise inflation, stabilise the Kwacha and grow the economy. So create jobs. For them they see a Zambian as a perpetual slave and a worker,” said Nawakwi.
