Rupiah has failed to deliver – Nawakwi
Rupiah has failed to deliver – NawakwiBy Patson Chilemba
Mon 27 Dec. 2010, 04:02 CAT
RUPIAH Banda’s government has seriously underperformed and has failed to deliver, says Edith Nawakwi. And Nawakwi said President Banda’s government should be transparent over the takeover of Finance Bank. In an interview, Nawakwi, who is FDD president, said Zambians were suffering amidst plenty because of misdirection of resources and energy. Nawakwi said there was very little to talk about in terms of progress.
She said the government claimed to have improved institutions like the University Teaching Hospital (UTH) but the majority of Zambians could not access some facilities because they were expensive.
“If people can’t get a meal, if the university is under-funded and ill-equipped, if people are dying on Great North Road every day, how do you rate them as a reporter yourself?” Nawakwi asked.
“If you go to Mandevu and see the heaps of garbage because this government has said the local government is not part of central government, clearly there is underperformance. And that is why we are going for elections next year, serious underperformance.”
Nawakwi said the country’s maize bumper harvest had now become a disaster because of serious underperformance by the government.
“Our bumper harvest is soaked. There is renal unit at UTH, yet you don’t have access, serious underperformance. We have poverty amidst plenty. It occurs because you have misdirection of resources and energy,” she said.
Nawakwi said the country had continued to subsidise the mining industry because the government had refused to reintroduce the windfall tax.
She said the mining companies were only spending about a hundredth of their turnover locally.
“Wouldn’t it serve us as Zambians if we start behaving like our colleagues in the DRC and Zimbabwe and trade in hard currency… since the minister is refusing to collect the windfall tax, the extra money which these people were not expecting?” Nawakwi wondered.
“Let these mines trade in dollars. It simply does not make sense when you say that you have US$2 billion growth reserves, your growth rate is six per cent, you have dollar income and yet your currency is in trillions.”
She said the government purchased hearses at great cost to the treasury but they were now being used as personal-to-holder vehicles in some areas.
Nawakwi said she still did not understand why the government removed the offence of abuse of office from the Anti Corruption Commission (ACC) Act.
She said the law did not hurt anybody but served as a deterrent.
“I don’t understand what mischief it was intended to solve. I don’t understand the logic. The courts are the correct authority to review government laws,” Nawakwi said.
And Nawakwi said the Bank of Zambia had done the nation injustice over the scanty information regarding the takeover of Finance Bank.
She said Finance Bank shareholders should also dispel assertions that they were involved in inside borrowing.
“The central bank is not telling us which companies in Finance Bank were involved in inside trading. They are just saying directors. We are entitled to transparency. We are demanding that Rupiah Banda’s government be transparent. Some of these things are creating a problem for the government because the operatives, the Governor Dr Caleb Fundanga I think he is failing in his duties,” Nawakwi said.
“And I take strong exception to them sending Chanda Chimba to be the one educating us on a serious matter like this one. We deserve better information.”
Nawakwi said the issues of Finance Bank had not started today.
She said when the matter arose during her reign as finance minister, the government requested the support of the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank to look into the issues surrounding the bank.
She said BoZ was empowered under the banking and financial services Act to take over an ailing bank, but not through nationalisation.
“If they were writing for the past three years, why didn’t they send a curator because we did that before?” Nawakwi said.
On the political front, Nawakwi said William Banda’s return to political leadership was the worst thing to have happened in the last two years.
She said only an alien would want to inflict pain on the Zambian people.
Nawakwi said Banda, the Lusaka Province MMD chairman, must prepare his bags to leave the country after next year’s elections.
On the attempts by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo to hold on to power after losing the elections, Nawakwi said in some country, the winner of elections was now serving as Prime Minister.
She said coalition governments in Africa signalled doom or the end of the democratic dispensation people had fought for in the last 60 years.
“Time has come for the African Union to have a continental army for the sole purpose of sorting out these despots - those African men who think democracy is nothing unless they are in power,” said Nawakwi.
Labels: EDITH NAWAKWI, FINANCE BANK, RUPIAH BANDA, WINDFALL TAX
posted by MrK @ 4:05 PM
2 Comments:
I would disagree with ms. Nawakwi's assessment of President Gbagbo. When he compares himself to President Mugabe, he is highlighting the fact that he is being retaliated against because his policies dared to diverge from the Washington Consenus.
Which is ironic, because ms. Nawakwi herself was subject to such manipulations when the IMF/WB forced the Zambian government to privatise the mines in 1999.
For background on the 'rice riots' in Ivory Coast, and President Gbagbo's response to them:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/03/08/0905717107.full.pdf
Following the violence in the streets of Abidjan in 2008 as a result of the high price of rice, President Laurent Gbagbo acted swiftly to suspend import taxes on rice and seek selfsufficiency in rice by 2012.‡ In his view, these moves were critical to restore civil order, such is the significance of rice to the Ivorian political economy. Furthermore, the call for selfsufficiency invoked an import substitution strategy that dates to the preindependence era (22).‡
Modest support for better processing could help to make local rice more competitive with imported rice. However, supply instability causes price fluctuations once regulated and now offering a market opportunity for cheap imports. When self-suf.ciency was briefly achieved in the 1970s, the state’s integrated production, processing, and marketing system was operating. Without such a system or the means to regulate the interests of politically powerful importers, and of the poor farmers who comprise the rice-growing labor, the president’s calls for self-suf.ciency risk having no weight. With imports flooding the country since liberalization, the state’s strategy to achieve self-sufficiency in rice will need to take into account competition between local and imported rice as well as promotion of other domestic food crops.
PS, the URL to this document is
http://www.pnas.org/content/
early/2010/03/08/0905717107.full.pdf
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