UPND has hit dead end on debt – Sichinga
By George Zulu
I SAID it in the beginning of their tenure in 2021 that our colleagues in the United Party for National Development (UPND) had no plan on how to deal with foreign debt other than depending on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for expensive loans, Bob Sichinga has said.
Sichinga, a former commerce, trade and industry minister, has said now that the IMF had cut loans for Zambia, it had become difficult for the UPND government to address the country’s debt burden and address economic problems ahead.
In an interview with The Mast, Sichinga said the UPND’s enemy was its failure to listen to advice on how it would have addressed the country’s debt burden.
He said the plan to depend on the IMF, World Bank and other multilateral institutions was the beginning of the failure to dismantle the debt.
“I said at the beginning of their tenure in 2021. I said they have no plan other than IMF. The people that we have in the ministry [of finance], the minister himself and several in his generation are people who specialise in IMF and the Brenthurst institutions. In other words, the World Bank, the IMF, IDA and so on, this is what they believe in,” Sichinga said.
He said the wild celebration of the attainment of debt restructuring Zambia witnessed on President Hakainde Hichilema’s return from France was misleading to citizens.
“The challenge is not that we can blame them for the debt that the PF created. We cannot blame UPND for that, but they should have known that as they took over government, there would be this debt, which is concomitant, that needed to be addressed. And it seems that their solution from their side, was let’s go to IMF,” he said.
