The official opening of the fourth session of the Twelfth National Assembly dubbed, ‘Accelerating sustainable development for a better Zambia amidst the impact of climate change,’ by President Edgar Lungu was flat.
The speech was flat as no call for action was put forth.
In his entire address, President Lungu took all the time to highlight the effects of climate change which at this point is not a hidden fact to majority of Zambians.
What Zambians were looking for were immediate interventions to mitigate the negative effects which has led the nation to face more than eight hours of load shedding.
He admitted that load shedding has negatively affected the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which was projected at four per cent but now the country will only register two per cent.
Instead of providing hope and immediate solution to this high figure of negative two per cent trend, the President took all the time using climate change as scapegoat for his government’s failure.
We elect leaders to solve the problems, we choose leaders to lead and not to use problems as the reason for their failure.
The sad part is that ever since the PF took over from MMD, the GDP trend has been declining from the almost eight per cent to now almost two per cent.
If government has capacity to borrow as the President said, this is the right time to borrow money to invest in energy and this time we must move away from hydro to alternative energy like solar which can be reliable.
Hydro has disappointed us not once or twice, yet government continue to subject its citizenry to high electricity tariffs at the hands of power utility firm which seems not ready to provide solutions.
We have enough sunlight to continue being subjected to rhetoric of Zesco and government.
At the moment the economy has heavily been affected because even industrial areas, town centres and health centres are affected.
We don’t know as to how many hours will be further slapped on the citizens as load shedding management mechanism by the time we reach scorching October.
