Maravi

NAPSA, the new Zamtrop

NAPSA, the new Zamtrop
By The Post
Sat 05 Mar. 2011, 04:00 CAT

If a foreign investor can be granted 5,000 hectares of land for nothing, why should pension contributors to NAPSA be made to pay US $15 million for 1,500 hectares of vacant land?

When we informed the nation about the rotten US $15 million NAPSA and MMD fund-raising land deal being championed by Robinson Zulu’s Meanwood, we were called all sorts of names.

When we questioned the morality of a state-run pension scheme buying land from a private entity at exorbitant prices, NAPSA tried to dismiss our observations as nothing.

They wanted the public to believe that what we were raising was not important.

As for Rupiah Banda, he did not even have the courage to address the serious issue that had arisen.

Instead he chose to attack us. NAPSA took out full-page adverts in this newspaper and in the two state-owned but government-controlled newspapers to denounce our exposure of their criminal scheme.

One of the issues that we raised and continue to raise is that it does not make sense for NAPSA as a state-run but public-funded pension scheme to buy land the way that an individual would purchase land.

To us, the behaviour of NAPSA clearly demonstrated that there is something criminal about this transaction.

It is no wonder that even people in Rupiah’s own MMD are raising concerns about this blatant abuse of state power in the name of financing politics.

We say in the name of financing politics because it is clearly understood even by those closest to Rupiah that these so-called fund-raising schemes for the party are actually money-making ventures for individuals.

It did not take very long after we questioned the logic of NAPSA buying land from Robinson before the same government, through one of its agencies, proudly announced that it had granted 5,000 hectares of land for nothing to a Saudi Arabian firm or company called Menafea Holdings.

This grant of land to Menafea was published in the latest issue of the Zambia Development Agency spotlight publication.

The state-owned but government-controlled Zambia Daily Mail carried this story prominently in their Wednesday, March 2, 2011 edition at page four.

It was not us who published this story but it was the state-owned media.

And yet the very next day, the same media was being used to denounce us and call us all sorts of names for questioning the NAPSA transaction.

NAPSA director general Stanley Phiri tried to put up a brave face in defending what could not be defended.

Their Meanwood transaction is nothing but naked theft of public funds.

We continue to ask: why should NAPSA have to buy land to build houses when companies coming from as far as Saudi Arabia are being given huge tracts of land for nothing?

We know that when people are caught doing what is wrong, they try to attack those who are exposing their wrongdoing instead of attending to their failures.

We will not be surprised if somebody says that the land which has been given to the Saudi Arabian company is not prime land but is land in some remote corner of the country in North Western Province.

But before these defenders of what is wrong get carried away, we want to remind them to look again at what Zambia Development Agency has announced.

Zambia Development Agency did not only announce the grant of 5,000 hectares to this Saudi Arabian company; they have also said that this Saudi Arabian company has entered an agreement to construct 2,000 housing units in the Lusaka South multi facility economic zone.

How much is Menafea Holdings paying for this prime land in Lusaka to construct 2,000 housing units?

It would be interesting to see the kind of agreement. Certainly, they are not paying Zambia Development Agency anything near US $15 million which is being paid to Robinson by NAPSA, if they are paying anything at all.

Rupiah and his minions should not think that our people are not able to read what is happening to their country.

It is said that you can fool some people sometimes but you cannot fool all the people all the times.

It is clear that the schemes to steal government money are many and varied. Most of them are being passed in the name of legitimate business transactions.

The tender processes within government and parastatal sectors have been cornered and rendered irrelevant in the protection of public resources. Rupiah’s clique is doing whatever they like.

We know for a fact that Robinson’s rotten deal is not the only dirty single-sourced MMD fund-raising transaction at NAPSA.

As we said, it is not the first time that public resources have been abused in this way. Frederick Chiluba did the same.

Maybe that is why he is Rupiah’s consultant.

And probably this is the reason why Rupiah had to do everything possible to ensure that Chiluba was let free in all his corruption cases and allowed to keep his loot.

Rupiah and his friends don’t seem to see anything wrong in what Chiluba did because they are doing the same things.

To them, power is there for personal enrichment, for abusing public resources.

What they are doing are no longer hidden things. It requires a little intelligence – if a little is all one has – to realise that the NAPSA land scam cannot be justified in any sense, legal or otherwise because it simply doesn’t make sense even to the least reasoning person.

These people have become so courageous in their stealing that they have started mistaking daylight for night.

They think nobody is seeing their criminal schemes when what they are doing is clear for all to see.

The problem with impunity is that those who engage in abuse of their offices start to believe that they are entitled to the benefits that they are extracting criminally.

They forget that there are many people who are watching what they are doing.

They also forget that not everybody is happy with what they are doing. People simply don’t like criminals.

What is worse is that the money they are stealing right now belongs to pensioners, to everyone who makes a monthly contribution to NAPSA.

They are simply stealing our people’s monthly contributions to NAPSA.

We are still waiting for Phiri to answer some simple questions we gave him yesterday.

But whilst he is working on that homework, we want him to also tell the nation: when and how, if so at all, did NAPSA ask Lusaka City Council or Chongwe District Council for land?

But also since some Saudi Arabian company is being given land to develop 2,000 housing units in Lusaka South through Zambia Development Agency, has NAPSA ever approached the Zambia Development Agency to be treated the same way?

We don’t expect any honest answers on these questions from Phiri, but we are asking them anyway.

We say this because what Phiri and his masters are involved in are not honest schemes, they are dishonest deals that cannot be explained with truth but can only be defended with lies, half-truths and calumny.

From the way Phiri is behaving, it seems he is a very bad student of history.

If he was a good student of history, he would have known that Chiluba and his tandem of thieves tried the kind of schemes they are doing.

As we said the other day, security was a preferred cover for their criminal scheme. Xavier Chungu, Chiluba’s disgraced chief of intelligence became a big contractor to government, claiming to install all sorts of security gadgets to safeguard government installations when in fact they were just stealing government money.

This is the scam that this newspaper exposed when we exposed the Zamtrop account.

There might be some variations in the execution, but it seems to us that NAPSA is another Zamtrop.

It is a can of worms waiting to be fully exposed.

But greediness blinds people from reality and impairs their capacity to learn from other people’s experiences.

The Lozis say micomibi isize ng’wanyi kwa litindi, meaning greediness got the eagle entangled.

Pomposity and arrogance makes people believe that they are better than the thieves before them.

Those were caught because they were not smart, ‘but we are smart, we have followed all the regulations’.

The last question for Phiri’s homework is this: if a Saudi Arabian company can be given 5,000 hectares and huge tracts of land to build 2,000 houses for nothing, why not NAPSA? Phiri should be careful.

What he is doing is what was happening in Zamtrop and we are right to conclude that NAPSA is the new Zamtrop!

Labels: CORRUPTION, MMD, NAPSA, RUPIAH BANDA, ZAMTROP

posted by MrK @ 6:05 AM