By Dr Lubinda Haabazoka
I hope now you understand why you need to make your own Zambians rich. When your Zambian citizens are rich, they concentrate on their own country! They bank their money in Zambia and donate in Zambia.
Just like Ndambo we have the GBMs, the Milupis, the Sikutwa’s, we had the Kavindeles, the Matanis and many others I don’t want to mention in order to insulate them from petty jealous. These are the people we need to concentrate on. We need to ensure that they become more rich so that we create generational wealth that will help build Zambia. We also need to concentrate on upcoming entrepreneurs and Zambians. Nurture them into becoming solid business people.
At the moment even government policy distracts wealth creation. The many taxes, fees and other charges you need to pay as a business is too much! The corporate income tax for small businesses is just too high! If we are serious, we can reduce income tax for companies with a turnover of less than a million dollars to 10%!
Let us concentrate on speaking about wealth creation rather than politics! If we are so passionate about fighting corruption with so many institutions created for the same, why can’t we be so passionate about fighting poverty and wealth creation? Why can’t we have the Anti poverty commission of Zambia? The Wealth Creation Commission of Zambia alongside the current CEEC?
We are so obsessed with destroying rather than building! The best way to fight poverty and corruption is to make things available and easy for citizens! Maybe people get corrupt because they can’t get things genuinely coz of stiff foreign competition? Let’s make it easy for everyone to tender! Zambians can provide services to government but when you look at tender documents, they can be 500 pages!!! In the absence of resources no one will bid or people will be forced to do shortcuts! Let’s make things easy for everyone! If everything is done online and with no queues, you remove corruption!
For me I don’t care who becomes rich. Tonga, Bemba, Lamba, PF, UPND or Socialist. If they are Zambian, let them be rich. In times that the country needs help, these are the people that will step in. So government should not shy away from empowering its people! A Zambian is a Zambian! Even if it’s carders they empower it’s ok! Those carders are Zambians and it means less burden on Zambian coffers when citizens becomes economically independent!
So now if we had harnessed wealth among Zambians, these tuma KCM would have been running under Zambian ownership. Deliberately creating wealth amongst citizens is very important! What is wrong is when only a few are eating while the rest are just watching on TV!
I receive a lot of queries from people asking me to connect them with anyone who can help them. Zambians are ready to work. All they lack in most cases is capital and a bit of skills on how to run businesses!
I would rather we hold business trainings in constituencies and wards! Now government says that they will be giving out CDF as seed capital. How many cooperatives are being trained in tuning businesses? Let’s not assume that one can just wake up and run a business! Business can be difficult especially is run by people in a cooperative who have come together not because it was their own idea but it is a condition to get money.
Let’s have mature discourse without emotions. Less on the talk and more on the actions! Even a Ndambo beauty pageant sure has to be political? This democracy has become a curse to this country! No wonder Kaunda scrapped it!!! Bushe when are we going to be serious aii???
One day Zambia will be tired of us and tell us to leave it for a bit because our behaviour does not add up!!!!
