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Vice president Mutale Nalumangu has warned that government will stop dealing with millers who will be caught inflating mealie-meal prices so that they can start buying maize from market.
Nalumango said it did not make sense for millers to be buying cheap maize from the Food Reserve Agency (FRA) when they were inflating the prices of the commodity.
“It is unacceptable for millers to be getting the people’s maize from FRA at an old price and selling the mealie meal at an inflated price,” Nalumango said when she featured on a live radio programme on Phoenix FM, dubbed Let the People talk on Friday.
Nalumango said the prices of mealie-meal would not really go down to K50 as was promised but people should be assured that the prices would reduce significantly.
She said the use of K50 mealie-meal was like a trade path such the one marketers use but did not mean that it would be exactly.
Read more: 17 millers receive cheap maize, as govt battles to force down prices
And Nalumango admitted failure by the government to be proactive in dealing with the escalating mealie-meal prices.
Nalumango said this was a historical problem that could be avoided had government been proactive.
She said prices of mealie-meal always went up at this time and had the government been proactive, they would have put in measures to ensure that this was contained.
“I personally take the blame for this, we should learn to be proactive because the issue of mealie-meal prices going up happens year in year out and we could do better,” Nalumango said
She admitted that mealie meal prices were high against the expectations of the government and they were working tirelessly to bring the cost down.
Meanwhile, phoning in the programme Shiwag’andu Member of Parliament Stephen Kampyongo, told the vice president that they should draw lessons from what was happening in the country and that the government should not trivialize matters when they were brought to parliament.
Kampyongo said the MPs started talking about the fertiliser as early as August last year but the government paid a deaf ears to it when they brought up the issue of export of maize and mealie-meal.
In response, Nalumango said according to the crop focus there was more than enough that was why they allowed the exports and food insecurity should not be an issue.
She understood that they promised change when they were in opposition and their expectation was that they were going to change the lives of people.
Nalumango said it was unfortunate that there was no way they would have foreseen the acts of God like climate change, war and other things that were affecting the global economy.
“The government is working to ensure that the process of fuel were mitigated but people should understand that the government does not set the prices of fuel, Zambia was just a victim of high fuel prices from the international market.
“We don’t care if we are a one term government, what we care about is that we are doing the right thing and we want people to remember us for doing the right things,” Nalumango.
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