The opposition Patriotic Front (PF) is in a hurry to regain power to complete the economic transformation agenda that it had set for the country before losing the 2021 general elections, Mporokoso Member of Parliament Brian Mundubile has said.
Speaking on Tuesday when he appeared on Diamond TV’s “This Day” program, Mundubile claimed that the former government had left the country at a stage of immense potential for economic transformation.
He explained that the PF regime had achieved that through the various infrastructure development projects it undertook around the country.
“What didn’t happen to this country for many years was that we left it at a potential level. What you would hear people say all the time was that there is a lot of potential in tourism, agriculture and so on and so forth,” Mundubile said.
“What President [Michael] Sata and President Edgar Chagwa Lungu did was that they took a bold stand by creating backbone infrastructure that would open up the country.”
He continued: “You will remember that our strategy was the open up strategy and this was through an integrated multi-sectoral approach and we began to open up roads countrywide, communication towers, power lines all countrywide. This was in a bid to industrialize.”
With the country looking set for economic transformation thanks to the massive investments made through infrastructure development, Mundubile said it was for this reason that the PF had an urgent desire to return to power and complete its development agenda.
“We are in a hurry to come back to complete the journey that we started. For us to grow this economy, we have to industrialize, and to be able to industrialize, we’ve got to invest. Investment has happened in part. What is required now is real investment in areas of tourism and agriculture,” he said.
“When we come back into power, we are going to focus on areas like tourism. There is a lot of potential in tourism that is why we have these three big airports that we constructed.”
He accused the successor UPND government of not utilizing the “massive potential” left by the PF, focusing instead on the social sector.
“Their budgets are mainly on social safety nets as it were. They’ve not looked at how Zambia can realize the potential that lies in it,” Mundubile claimed.
