Zambia is poised to have a maize surplus this season but it is still unlikely that the food will reach many of the 58 percent of Zambians that are classified as extremely poor. The ministry of agriculture recently released a national food balance sheet showing that the country will have a surplus of 160,000 metric tonnes of maize during the 2006/07. In the 2005/06 season the output was 63 percent above the previous season and 54 percent above the five-year average.
Only a few years ago, such a surplus of Zambians’ main staple crop would have seemed an unreachable dream. Successive droughts had caused a food crisis in the eastern and southern parts of the country, the main maize producing areas.
Zambia’s anti-corruption drive is failing because the government has been concentrating its resources on investigating the corrupt practices of the previous regime, allowing present graft in the public service to flourish, a corruption watchdog said in its latest report. Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Indices [CPI] has consistently ranked Zambia as one of the most corrupt countries since 2001.
In a stirring speech punctuated with applause, Zambia’s former leader Kenneth Kaunda set the tone Monday for Mahatma Gandhi’s satyagraha centenary commemoration here by lashing out at the US and Britain for unleashing a war in Iraq.Kaunda, who mesmerised the packed Vigyan Bhavan auditorium here with his powerful speech that ended with a song to purge Africa from the scourge of AIDS, asked all those funding terrorism to channel the money to fight tuberculosis and AIDS.