Western Province Permanent Secretary, Emmanuel Mwamba has supported the decision by government to lift subsidies on fuel and maize subsidies.
Speaking when he appeared on a live Muvi Television Assignment program, Mr. Mwamba stated that Zambia is a poor country with high and urgent development needs and could not afford to spend its meager resources on subsidies especially those on consumption.
Mr. Mwamba also said that there are still numerous subsidies that people in the country are still enjoying such as the supply of electricity whose tariffs are pegged by ZESCO at below their supply costs.
He cited free education and the bursary schemes at Universities as other areas where the government is still maintaining subsidies.
Meanwhile Mr. Mwamba has condemned the lopsided investment in maize over the last decades and suggested that it is important for the country to know that Maize alone is not what forms the Agriculture sector.
He notes that such a lopsided investment in maize has led to other segments of the sector such as livestock, fish farming and cash crops such as rice, cashew nuts, and traditional crops such as sorghum and millet that can lift the people out of poverty, to be consequently neglected.
The Western Province Minister has further disclosed that his provincial administration has revived the cashew industry which has capacity to create thirty thousand jobs in farming and earn the country up to fifty million US dollars per year.
He has also stressed the need for the Ministry of Agriculture to draw up an urgent program to eliminate diseases that had plagued the cattle and reduced its population and value in his province