The taking over of the chairmanship for the Common Market for Eastern and Southern African States (COMESA) by President Hakainde Hichilema barely two years after ascending the highest office in the land, further confirms the confidence that the regional heads of State and government have reposed in our President’s leadership attributes.
As a country currently holding the rotational chair, we need to speedily leverage on the visibility that this feat places on us by maximizing on the multiple business opportunities that are birthed by this development. With the New Dawn government’s unwavering stance on both corruption fight and the attendant asset recovery roadmap, we need to fully resuscitate some of our hitherto flourishing industries and surge our aggregate exports in the non mining sector of our economy.
We have to follow up on our Presidents recent visit to Angola by engaging the authorities in that country for us to enter into a formal agreement to supply military garments to their defence and security personnel. This is precisely where Mulungushi Textiles can play a critical role by scaling up production to full capacity once we persuade the Angolan government to give us an order to supply uniforms to them on a five to ten year contract basis.
In turn, this will predictably stimulate the participation of our small, medium and large scale commercial farmers in the value chain of cotton production as the demand for the commodity will substantially increase should we make a breakthrough with Angola and possibly Democratic Republic of Congo. Lastly but not the least, let us also revive our productive sector especially in the pharmaceutical industry as we still have structures like the General Pharmaceuticals company in Kabwe, formerly under the INDECO group of companies in the Kaunda era, which can begin to produce an array of medicines for much of the COMESA market and the time is now when we are holding the chairmanship of the regional economic grouping , of course along with the proximate SADC entity which happens to be the Siamese twin of COMESA.
Maj Ben Phiri, Office of the UPND SG
