Let’s invest in water harvesting technologies and boost agriculture – HH
When our colleagues in the PF regime embarked on uncontrolled borrowing, we sounded the dangers of taking such an economic route that has again taken us deep into debt crisis, worse than the UNIP era.
We find ourselves in this highly indebted position but without anything to show for in terms of investment in areas that would have yielded immediate dividends to enable us repay the loans while creating jobs for thousands of our people, especially the youth.
All we are seeing are highly overpriced capital projects, where the main beneficiaries are a few PF politicians and their associates through corruption.
As UPND, in the first place, we would have avoided reckless borrowing, especially from very expensive windows such as Eurobonds which attract very high interest rates, but this government had no stringent measures on the usage of this resource.
If we were to borrow, we would have applied resources in areas such as water harvesting technologies like dams, canals, and others to ensure that our farmers can be assured of water reservoirs throughout the year for growing crops and looking after our livestock.
Is it not a shame that a country that sits on 40 percent of fresh water bodies in Southern Africa can today be facing a real challenge of hunger as a result of poor rainfall in some parts of the country?
On the other hand, countries such as Israel and others that are primarily deserts are able to feed their people and even export processed food stuffs to countries such as Zambia.
How embarrassing that the entire Zambian government top leadership could waste taxpayers money visiting a desert country like Israel to admire how they grow cabbages and other vegetables when it should have been the other way around?
If it were for us, all we could have done was to just invite experts from Israel and other countries for technological sharing in water harvesting mechanisms which can be private driven initiatives, not requiring government expenditure, but just government support through the right policies.
Our choice of leadership as a country defines who we are as country, and now as Zambians we are paying a huge price for having a leadership whose agenda is to line up their pockets through corruption instead of addressing the wider economic issues that benefit the majority.
We know they will not understand it and they don’t even take our advise, but for us, we fully know how agriculture exports can be a key revenue earner for the state if implimented well alongside value addition industries.
For example, we look forward to a situation where our small scale farmers, especially the youth, can be empowered with simple technologies for processing tomatoes into tomato paste, and other agriculture products for domestic consumption and export to neighbouring countries.
For now, we should know that unstable climatic conditions due to global warming are with us, hence the earlier we take decisive measures, the better.
We shall continue explaining more on how we would have used borrowed money for immediate benefits that does not overburden us with debt.
Hakainde Hichilema
UPND President