Small thieves equally sabotaging progress; cage them!

When announcing the increase of the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), which is obviously one of the hallmarks of his leadership, from a paltry K1.4 million to the staggering K24.7 million, President Hakainde Hichilema famously declared, “we are taking money away from a small number of “big thieves” in Lusaka and disbursing it to provinces and constituencies countrywide for development. ”

Who are these small number of thieves in Lusaka, one may wonder.

These may have been Cabinet ministers or senior government officials such as Permanent Secretaries and Directors as well as senior party officials in the previous regime who had no qualms dipping their magnetic fingers into the ‘cookie jar’ and deprive our people of goods and services (development) for selfish reasons!

And today, most of these are overnight millionaires boasting of an array of asset portfolio – breathtaking mansions in posh neighbourhoods; highly mechanised farms; impressive fleets of state of the art vehicles and Bank accounts piling-up with enormous amounts of money, which they’d be forced to give to their side-chicks to stash in the garages for them at times!

And since most of them can not explain the source of their sudden wealth, they’re either rotting or destined to jail for lengthy prison sentences of course with their multiple properties forfeited to the state.

While we remain for ever indebted to our President for such a brilliant initiative, it’s however sad to note that there’s still equally a legion of small thieves lurking in almost all the public offices intent on sabotaging progress……

They are like termites slowly eating up a building. Day and night, they pinch drugs from dispensaries in hospitals to stock up their pharmacies in the townships; they include fake names of beneficiaries on social cash transfer lists thereby depriving deserving individuals; they wantonly defraud the state by inflating costs of CDF projects and scheme how to keep government grants into their pockets.

These may be ‘small thieves’ pilfering minute amounts here and there as compared to the big thieves in Lusaka; however, they’re large in numbers and their combined efforts could literally paralyse service delivery! Imagine the DEBs conniving with school head to ‘chew’ the grants? Imagine WDCs colluding with council workers to inflate the cost of projects? Imagine Doctors conniving with nurses to steal medicines from hospitals? Imagine the DACOs conniving with agriculture extension officers to divert fertiliser?

Would the nation be guaranteed effective service delivery?

Negative! And everyone is going to conclude this particular government is failing to deliver according to the expectations of our people.
Can we please come up with measures to protect the resources we are disbursing to the districts and see to it that they are being utilised for the intended purpose other than giving birth to new millionaires in town.

Prince Bill M Kaping’a
National Coordinator – HH Mpaka 2031 People’s Alliance