K28.5; Volatile Exchange Rate Market…What needs to be done….- Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba
K28.5; Volatile Exchange Rate Market
…What needs to be done….
Amb. Emmanuel Mwamba Wrote;
1. Collect fair and just taxes especially from the mining sector now.
2. Widen the tax base, bring more people inside the tax bracket. Use innovative ideas such as t-pin linked to mobile phones and all payments, as Tanzania and India have done.
3. Cancel immediately all incentives given to the mining sector.
4. Implement fully and at once, the Bank of Zambia Export Proceeds Tracking Mechanism and ensure all export proceeds report to a local bank account. Tell Situmbeko Musokotwane to keep away as he is the biggest hindrance to this proposal.
5. Let BOZ significantly drop those Monetary Policy Rate and statutory reserve ratio on both local and foreign currency deposits.
6. Stop Government Borrowings,Currently the biggest beneficiaries to high domestic borrowings by the State are banks who are making super profits, while the market is starved of affordable and cheap loans and financing.
7. Implement the industrialisation policy in earnest. Begin with import substitution manufacturing. You cannot be landlocked and be import-oriented. That’s the perfect disaster.
8. Agriculture sector. Stop planning to feed 20million people yet you have a population of 400million people surrounding you. Stop anti-smuggling operations. That’s trade. Formalise it, recognise it.
Further Plan and grow to feed 400million people.
9. Deliberately begin to migrate the economy from multi-nationals and foreign-owned economy to local businesses and local ownership.
10. Reform immediately the salary based loans from micro-finance institutions. They have made your workers and turned them into slaves. Do a debt swap to public sector workers who you owe millions while they are yoked to debts with microfinance institutions.
11. Stop criminalizing wealth, stop harrassing your business people, your contractors, suppliers, and service providers.
This way, the rich Zambians will stop stashing their wealth in Mauritius, Seychelles, Dubai and other offshore jurisdictions.
12. Pay your contractors, suppliers and service providers
It’s not your money, they worked or supplied. You did all your forensic audits and cleared them. Pay them.
Government will remain the largest provider of business for a longtime.
13. Get a new economic team. Musokotwane and Kalyalya believe in borrowings to run the economy.
They believe in granting tax concessions and incentives to the mines. This robs the country of domestic revenue.
14. The Vatican is running global debt cancellation campaign. Get on board, the debt reschedule you got is a raw deal.
Use the opportunity to seek cancellation or debt forgiveness.
15. Stop recruitment in public service. Conduct reforms. See where you really need to employ. Your public sector wage bill is already consuming 52% of all all your revenue. You cannot spend half your national budget on 300,000 people. When do you cater for the rest of the 20million? When do you do development?
Try them.
