By Staff Writer
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) on the Copperbelt says the ruling PF is like a combine harvester garnering every coin from citizens without any remorse.
Copperbelt NDC Chairperson Chipoka Mulenga said lately PF has introduced several avenues of reaping every coin from the citizens to water its dried up wells of the treasury.
Speaking in a press statement with The Independent Observer, Mr Mulenga said the loan repayment for students may be okay but it has been ill-timed.
He said from the recently introduced 30 ngwee tax on internet calls, the PF Government still wants more avenues of yoking citizens.
“The student loan repayment has been brought with wrong timing just as the colonial Withholding tax has been. This government is broke and looking for any ways of wrecking the Zambian citizens while they offer tax havens to Chinese Nationals and lucrative contracts to Lebanese.
“Most Zambian graduates are either unemployed or working for Chinese and Lebanese with very poor salaries. The government must conduct a non-political survey and investigate how many loan recipients are working and what kinds of employment are they in? Certainly very poor to most,” he said.
Mr Mulenga said MMD the architect of student loans decided to leave it silent because Government needs to appear to have a face and not a monster.
“However, the tax driven PF have encroached with long hands. Look at the timing of enacting the colonial withholding tax! Very wrong to the core! The economic standing of Zambians is frail and the little they’ve innovatively tried to earn is all being taken by the government.
“There’s no country that can develop when citizens have no money in their hands. Zambia under the PF regime is only showing signs of continued poverty for the locals and enriching of foreign nationals alongside government officials,” he said.