PRESIDENT Edgar Lungu is helpless to the people, says Rainbow Party general secretary Wynter Kabimba.

And Kabimba says the commission of inquiry into the privatisation will be politicised and those leading it will be clueless cadres.

Meanwhile, Kabimba says miners should brace for more job cuts in 2019 under the leadership of President Lungu, especially that the government was looking confused.

“Everywhere in the world, international monopoly capital will resist any form of tax that is characteristic number one of international monopoly capital more so in a third world country where the governments look more confused and disorganised like ours,” Kabimba said.
“I was laughing when I saw President Lungu in Kitwe saying we will not allow the mines to retrench anybody. Bwana you have no power to stop the mines to do what they want to do. You just have no powers. The mining companies are more powerful than the President; I can tell you that. In 2016, they retrenched over 10,000 workers and President Lungu was President, what did he do? Nothing. What he did instead was go to Chingola and hive-off a piece of land and said to the miners, ‘become farmers’, there is nothing that he did, he couldn’t stop that. We need a government that can sit down with the mines.”

Kabimba, a former PF general secretary, added that the country needed leaders who would think of the welfare of the people because it was an important task.

“Running a country is a serious business, we need a crop of leaders in the PF that can sit down, spend sleepless nights to delve into these problems and find solutions to issues like these, just to make a pep-talk statement [like] ‘we will not allow the mines to retrench’… they [mines] just save themselves a double tot of whisky and laugh it off and I can bet my last dollar on this, wait, you will hear more retrenchments in 2019 with President Lungu in power and he will do nothing. He is helpless; they [mines] are more powerful than him,” he said.

Kabimba added that the mines were too strong for the PF and would easily pull out of the business to make the PF beg them to come back.

“The way the situation is now, the government is too weak to negotiate with the mines because they can close down these mines and go out there and tell their brothers no to come and buy these mines and that is what they did in 1994-95. They will tell the World Bank not to give you any money, the will tell the IMF not to give you any bail out until you go back to them and say ‘please can you come back because we have abolished the taxes’, that is the character of International monopoly capital, especially in the third world countries where governments have no tools of analysis, where people knock off from offices at 15:00 hours and spend the rest of the time drinking instead of thinking about the country, these are the consequences,” he said.

Kabimba further said President Lungu does not consult before making statement, especially off-cuff ones.

“There is no thinking process put into these decisions. I was laughing when I listened to President Lungu at the airport, and this is also the danger of making statements off the cuff; when he said ‘I will take the issue of the commission of inquiry on privatisation to Cabinet’. I can tell you that when you look at that Cabinet paper, it will be 2 pages, it will have no historical context, I bet they can’t even find the documents on privatization by today, we are very bad at archiving information in this country. You won’t get any document even from the National Archives, the so called memory bank of the nation,” he said.

Kabimba further alleged that the current investigative wings had no capacity to investigate white-collar crimes.

“We have no capacity to investigate white collar crime. You are going to be using prosecutors from central police who can’t even construct a sentence properly, who can’t even follow the questions in cross-examination, he doesn’t even know what he is asking, he has never seen a cheque book in his life, he doesn’t know how a transaction moves from one bank to another bank and that is your prosecutor,” Kabimba said.
“You are going to have a commission of inquiry set up where you are going to line up PF chaps who are saying nothing, condemning one individual or another individual and you politicise the whole thing and the whole thing will come to zero.”

Kabimba was speaking on Radio Phoenix’s Let The People Talk programme.