Late last year, we wrote an article whereby we suggested that since our country is not at war…..and not likely to go to war any time soon, it would be prudent to encourage our men and women to help us improve food security. Hereunder, we reproduce part of the article in question:

“The country is effectively at war with imminent hunger. The same way we’d summon the mighty of the military to help clean up our cities whenever there’s an outbreak of Cholera, we expect the military, particularly ZNS to come in and help the nation contain hunger.

Phiri (the Agriculture Minister) must request Gary Nkombo, (the Minister of Local Government then) to engage our traditional leaders to consider surrendering massive tracts of land, particularly in areas where they’ve vast water bodies. Once enough land has been secured, the Agriculture minister must further liaise with the Defence minister, Ambrose Lufuma to beseech the President who is of course the Commander in Chief of armed forces to give ‘marching orders’ to the men and women in uniform to take to the fields without further ado and help grow more maize using irrigation methods, if the rains fail us.”

A number of people didn’t take kindly to this, of course…..they wasted no time mocking us and calling us all sort of names. And boom…..a few months later, what do we see? From the Zambia Army establishments in Solwezi or Chipata; the Zambia Air Force base in Mbala to the Zambia National Service fields countrywide…..the story is all the same – Bumper harvest after Bumper harvest! Bravo to all our soldiers! The work you have done shall definitely go a long way in stablising the price of ‘our staple food’ as there will be surplus of the commodity. We don’t have to belabour the point; this is simple and straight forward!

If we may digressa little bit, may we now tackle the elephant in the room – youth employment! Without being seen to be seemingly attempting to ‘sway’ them away from their core mandate of defending and protecting our nation, we are appealing to government to consider further utilising the military to embark on a journey of industrializing our country as this would go a long way in triggering jobs galore that everyone is talking about.

The problem we have in Africa is that we always want to allow the West to dictate to us how we should run our countries. In countries such as China, Pakistan, Turkey and Indonesia; the military own businesses spanning from transport and logistics, real estates, manufacturing, construction, telecommunications and hospitality industry. One may argue that ZNS is already doing that……yes, but on small scale!

What is stopping our military from setting up farms to grow ‘green gold’ (marijuana) for export purposes? Why can’t the military establish companies to construct our roads as opposed to giving contracts to foreigners? We already have an open market in neighbouring Congo DR for mealie meal, beef, chicken, fish and vegetables etc, can’t the military take advantage of such and employ youngsters to work on their farms? Can somebody convince us our military can surely fail to operate emerald or gold mines?

We’ve almost won the battle against hunger; it’s high time the military helped us tackle youth unemployment head on!

Salute!

Prince Bill M. Kaping’a
Political/Social Analyst