Zambia heading for disaster, says Sinkamba

PETER Sinkamba, the leader of the Green Party says the mealie-meal situation in the country where citizens are being forced to brave the night to queue for the Zambia National Service (ZNS) product is unacceptable and getting out of hand.

Reacting to the near stampede that happened at Cosmopolitan Shopping Mall in Lusaka, Mr Sinkamba said Government must quickly find solutions to the self-inflicted dilemma that the country finds itself in.

He said it was unacceptable to subject people to the kind of suffering were they have to stand in long queues just to buy the staple food which was available in abundance just a few years ago.

Mr Sinkamba said Zambia was in a serious quagmire that it would be very difficult to implement the imports that the Minister of Information and Media had announce because the region was experiencing the same drought and wanted to safeguard their reserves.

He said it was disturbing to have a minister assure the nation that government was going to procure maize from Tanzania and other East African countries.

Mr Sinkamba said everyone knows Tanzania had made an order for maize from Zambia last year which the country did not honour the obligation to deliver the maize 100 percent.

He said today, Tanzanians were buying maize in the northern part of Zambia where they were having favourable rainfall when the maize was still in the field.

“How can we have a government who are saying that they buy maize from a neighbouring country that is still buying maize from us at the moment, it’s a disaster we are in because the UPND sold off all the strategic reserves to that country,” he said.

Mr Sinkamba said according to the Tanzanian integrated food security phase classification which projected that about two million people will be food stressed meaning they also need to secure food for those people.

He said Zambia has to source for maize elsewhere away from the region which would take a long time and the people would be starved unless they buy GMO from South Africa which is also against the laws of Zambia.