Police in Kasama had a tough time to control the crowd scrambling for meal-mealie at Kasama milling TAZARA outlet yesterday.
And ZANIS news crew that rushed to the scene found long queuing as people struggled to buy the commodity.
The residents told ZANIS that the millers have caused an artificial shortage by packaging the commodity in 10 kilogrammes (kg) bags and not in 25 kg bags and are selling the small bags at KR25.
And a survey carried out in town revealed that all outlets had no 25 kg bags of mealie-meal.
At PTJ Supermarket only 10 kg bags of mealie-meal were found while at National Milling Company, management had put up a notice that there was no mealie-meal in the shop.
And when contacted for a comment, Northern Province Minister Col. Garry Chanda said the shortage was created by greedy millers who have taken advantage of the situation by creating an artificial shortage of 25 kg bags of mealie-meal.
He said Food Reserve Agency has enough stocks of white maize in the shed and in order to control the situation he directed that households to be buying two bags of 25 kg of white maize.
Kasama district has in the recent past recorded shortage of 25kg bag of meal mealie causing panic to consumers.
ZANIS
Ba GBM please support your people who voted for you
I was about to say the same, Where is GBM when his people need him. I forgot he is busy fighting with Kabimba
There’s mealie meal at State House and Omelo Mumba road my dear Muchingans! Please go and ask your President , he will attend to your problems! Mwanawasa and Magande have farms. RB and Musokotwane have farms! Sata and Chikwanda? Herein lies the problem. People who think that their mealie meal, chicken, beef or milk comes from the supermarket cannot be expected to manage the agriculture sector efficiently!
The demand and supply in the region for maize is not equal hence the looming shortages.its just Zambia that has maize in the region hence the need to manage well the crop marketing.Kasama area nakonde and all the border areas are also known for rampant smuggling to tanzania,kenya Rwanda etc
These mealie meal problems have just started with PF.Nakonde Border and DRC border with Zambia have always been there but they never affected the availability of mealie meal in Zambia during the reign of MMD.For the first time in 20 years,Zambia will surely import maize this year!!!!!
10kg for KR25? Bwahahahahah!
Well, that’s one way to fix PF’s attempt at dictating prices. Next, I suppose they’ll put a “toy surprise” inside some bags and market it as “specialty” mealie meal. Better is to learn you can’t mess with the market, but that seems too complex for this government to understand.
The situation is worse in Solwezi
Where’s uncle GBM and his milling company! Please help our poor people! SOS!
Dunch kubeba, dats wht thy wantd…. Hweva GBM help yo employers pliz
that nice song donchi kubeba who has a copy mine got scratched
Donchi kubeba is working. How can the Bemba Patriotic Front (Bemba-PF) make its own people in Kasama suffer like that? What a pity!! Anyway lies always backfire.
Consequences of voting on tribal lines. Why vote for chaps who do not understand agriculture.