Lundazi central constituency member of parliament ,MP, Mkondo Lungu has appealed to the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit, DMMU, under the office of the vice president to urgently send more relief food to Lundazi.
Mr. Lungu said the 860.5 metric tonnes of relief food sent to the area was inadequate due to widespread hunger in the valley.
Mr. Lungu who was accompanied by his Lumezi counterpart Isaac Banda, made the appeal when he addressed DMMU committee members in Lundazi yesterday.
He said the purpose of the meeting was to get first hand information on the distribution of relief food in the district.
The MP also blamed the vulnerability assessment team from the office of the vice president for conducting vulnerability assessment exercise in November last year
without consulting local line ministries resulting in most hunger prone areas being
left-out in the report.
Mr. Lungu said out of 27 wards in the district, the vulnerability assessment team from Lusaka only selected 10 as eligible for relief food, a situation he described as unfortunate.
Speaking at the same meeting, Mr Nemiah Tembo who is co-ordinator for Wildlife Conservation Society, a lead NGO appointed by government to distribute relief food
in the 10 selected wards, said the exercise was almost complete despite inaccessible roads and washed away bridges.
Meanwhile, Lumezi MP Isaac Banda disclosed that government allocated K6 billion in this year’s budget for patching up the dilapidated Lundazi-Chipata road while waiting for a donor to fund the complete overhaul of the road.
ZANIS
Lungu and your counterpart Banda, we know that there is Famine and all terms you have come up with. Global warming and what you can call them. But my simple advice is “Don’t just sit,and Beg, Morning, Noon, Night”. Be innovative and think of ways your people will not starve. Who told you that you and your constituents were born to beg. You are always talking about Pride. Where have you seen a Proud Man begging ? Think twice before you go begging. There is alot your people can do,to stop starvating.
If the technocrats have made an assessment, why should we go by a politician expressing his biased assessment? And let the MP turn his subjects from begging-its dehumanising.