President Hakainde Hichilema attended the Zambia National Farmers Union’s Day held at Mr Dickson Kachingwe’s farm in Mpongwe District, Copperbelt Province, yesterday.Addressing the nation, Hakainde said agriculture remains one of Zambia cornerstones thus it needs to be supported in order to grow.
He said:
This sector has however suffered unprecedented corruption in areas such fertiliser procurement, eventually leading to small scale farmer facing challenges including failing to produce.
Going forward, this won’t be tolerated. You, fellow Zambians elected us to correct these ills of economic development.
We are optimistic that as we work together, this sector will be revamped and eventually lead to jobs and business opportunities.
We say this to fertiliser and other farming inputs suppliers: come to the table with clean hands devoid of over pricing of commodities, otherwise we will have difficulty working with you.
Citizens may to note that for prices of commodities like mealie meal to go down, we need fair prices across the chain of production and this is what we are working on in government.
We are all partners in development. No one should be make huge profits at the expense of others. You are supplier of goods and services, bid and if your prices are fair, you have the capacity to deliver and can deliver quality, then government will give you business. If none of the above is taken into consideration, then nothing will come your way because we have done away with the old ways of the doing business.
Fellow citizens. As your country’s Chief Marketing officer, we have been identifying potential markets for all our nation’s produce and so far, Democratic Republic of Congo and Botswana are available. It is in this line that we again strongly state that there should be nobody from Zambia stopping anyone to do cross-border trading or indeed sell their produce in neighbouring countries in need of the same.
We are working hard to ensure that local produce like cabbages, onion among others should find themselves in big trading centers as opportunities to export do exist. Let’s focus our minds on growing in excess for there’s a ready market for our produce in the region.
As we all know: no farmer, no food.
While in this part of our country, we listened to our traditional leaders who play an integral part in ensuring unity and development. Our pledge to them is that we work with and for them for the betterment of our country.
Fellow citizens. Zambia is blessed and we have no doubt in mind that this country during our tenure of public office, will experience a paradigm shift which will see a lot of economic activities.
