Binwell schools Govt on management of gold

NKANA independent Member of Parliament, Binwell Mpundu says government should have declared all the places were gold has been discovered in the country as protected areas and enable the Zambia Gold Company to manage the resource.

Mr Mpundu said UPND was doing extremely poor in terms of managing resources and had no right to accuse their predecessors of having mismanaged the country’s resources.

He said the new dawn was a worst government the country had never had in handling resources.

He said Zambia was extremely rich with resources and it cannot take the UPND government five years for them to begin managing the gold.

Mr Mpundu said luckily before the PF left office they had created a vehicle called the Zambia Gold Company which would had been utilise.

The lawmaker said Zambia would have had enough gold reserves by now.

“If they had continued just on that slate by now the government would have managed the gold reserves and deposits around the country, UPND are doing a very bad job in managing the national assets, ” he said.

He said there was currently a gold rush in the country and the government was sleeping instead of exploiting the resource in order to make the country’s economy revamp again.

Mr Mpundu said if the gold was managed properly it would not had take them more than two years to manage the debt problem.

Mr Mpundu also said Sugilite in Luapula which does not require the government to put in much as it was with copper, was being illegally exploited by suspected UPND cardres.

He said from the time Sugilite was discovered the minister responsible of mines Paul Kabuswe had not given a proper policy direction on how the resource would be exploited.

Meanwhile, Mr Mpundu said the easiest sign to understand the economic performance of a nation was the relationship between the country’s currency and the major convertibles which was shambolic under the current administration.

He said it was wrong for the UPND to use old formulas to resolve the economic situation of the country, the route they took of the G20 common frame work was being written off by many scholars.

“We are not being malicious and we are not politicking, the performance of the UPND economically has been extremely been pathetic because at this stage almost half way of the UPND tenure there must be sure signs that the country was headed for victory but for now the picture is still very gloomy that there was nothing good that seems to be in sight,” he said.