By Thomas Ngala
INSALA iyi, ilemoneka kwati ilekonkanyapo [ It seems this hunger will continue haunting us], warns Shiwang’andu Member of Parliament Stephen Kampyongo.
On Friday, when he and other Patriotic Front (PF) parliamentarians held a briefing at Parliament grounds, Kampyongo observed that the cost of living had gone through the roof.
He lamented that Zambians were struggling to have the staple food on their tables/
“…And this is nshima. Because the cost of a bag of mealie -meal now is around K420 in some shops and where it is being sold cheaply, courtesy of those milling plants that the Patriotic Front (PF) government left, the milling plants under the Zambia National Service [ZNS] and Zambia Correctional Service [ZCS] which were meant for a specific purpose are now being used to try and mitigate the situation, which is fairly okay,” he said. “But what is not okay is how people now are being treated. People get this mealie -meal from these milling plants which seem to be cheaper and this mealie- meal is not delivered sales points of certain traders.”
He recalled that on Wednesday, acting Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry Felix Mutati, was giving a rundown of how the price of mealie- meal had fluctuated.
“And in his own statement, he informed the nation that from 2021, mealie- meal was costing K141. And we all know that the promise to the people was that from that K141, it was expected that the price of mealie -meal was going to be brought down to K50, which now is not the case. And according to honourable Mutati, the price of mealie -meal was fluctuating between K315 to K400. How many citizens are able to afford those prices?” he wondered. “We remember that her honour the Vice-President did advise us to try roller meal. Roller meal isn’t cheaper either. So, we sympathize with our people and the unfortunate development is that we don’t see any hope of the mealie-meal prices coming down any time soon. Why? Because the agriculture policies which are being implemented are not speaking to production of adequate food.”
Regarding the ministerial statements that agriculture minister, Mtolo Phiri delivered in Parliament, Kampyongo recalled that the minister said out of the three million plus small-scale farmers who are supposed to benefit from the government support, the government was only able to give support under the Farmer Input Support Programme (FISP) to about one million farmers.
“Now, this has left our farmers stressed and under pressure because now they have been forced to be sharing fertilizer using what we call tuma meda [small buckets] measures in their cooperatives because they are so many and they want to farm. Now, the rest of the two million farmers, he contradicted himself by informing us that out of those two million, those two million farmers were to benefit from what we call CASP. That CASP has now been replaced by what they are calling Sustainable Agriculture Financing Facility (SAFF),” he said. “Now, here is very interesting mathematics from the minister. Two million farmers, he was even proud to tell us that out of that two million, only 55,000, countrywide, applied to access support from SAFF. Out of that 55,000, only 7,000 were approved. Now, 10 provinces, you have that minor number, and you are very comfortable as minister of agriculture to even come to the national assembly and share those figures. What has happened to the rest of the farmers?”
He complained that “you are even saying regardless of these farmers getting very little inputs and seeds, they must sell you 10 bags of maize. So, we find this very strange and our areas, Northern, Eastern, North Western Province and Northern province are recording reasonable amount of rainfall.”
The lawmaker said it would have been prudent that the input supply to those areas was adequate for the farmers to grow enough food so that the prices of mealie -meal could then be expected to reduce
“But that is not the case. The minister is comfortable to tell you that under this SAFF, the new program which has troubled people, people moving from Malole to Kasama, moving from far flung areas of Shiwang’andu…” he said “…they inherited about 3.5 metric tonnes of maize in the sheds and they willingly sold… we knew that it was going to be difficult for them to replace such stocks. The year that followed, we dropped the production levels from 3.6 to about 2.6, the subsequent year, 1.5 metric tonnes. The other year they didn’t even give us the statistics. Insala iyi, ilemoneka kwati ilekonkanyapo[ It seems this hunger will continue haunting us. And we would like the minister of agriculture to go and tour the country and see how farmers have struggled. Because, when he is talking here in Lusaka, you would think everybody has accessed this SAFF, if you don’t look at the figures and number he is talking about.”
He called on Phiri to be accountable to Zambians.
