CHANGING CURRENCY WOULD HAVE EASED CORRUPTION

HAD President Hakainde Hichilema changed the country’s currency soon after taking up the country’s presidency, pursuing leaders of the past administration who could have had accumulated wealth illegally or were keeping money in their homes would have yielded results, governance activist Crawford Mukando has said.

Mr Mukando said changing the currency would have helped to bring back the country’s looted resources from suspected plunderers from the previous government.

He said the country had failed to move economically because the money was still in the hands of a few individuals, which money could be well fit the description of proceeds of crime.

“The current economic malaise is due to little or limited circulation of the Kwacha in the fiscal market, which is also precipitated by the holding on to the millions of stolen Kwacha notes, during the previous regime,” Mr Mukando said.

Mr Mukando said one of the reasons Zambians were not benefitting from the reduction in the inflation rate was because the Kwacha was in the hands of a few individuals thus the slow supply of the local currency on the money market. He said changing the currency would have helped coerce suspected looters to invest or launder the money back into circulation which would have helped the kwacha sustain its value.

Mr. Mukando said some scholars had a different version or school of thought that people who were perceived to have looted public money were easily going to exchange the cash into hard convertible currencies.

Mr. Mukando said there was still hope for economic recovery, but the focus of Government should shift from macroeconomics policies which only impresses the international creditors and lenders for credit worthiness, to micro economics which directly affected the household economics and social struggles.