Former Special Assistant to late President Levy Mwanawasa for Policy and Project Implementation and Monitoring Jack Kalala has defended the Mwanawasa administration over the sale of Konkola Copper Mines (KCM).
Mr Kalala said the Mwanawasa administration handled the sale of KCM to Vedanta above board.
And Mr. Kalala says Zambians should direct their anger at the people who reversed the windfall tax instead of condemning Mr Mwanawasa who did everything in his power to ensure that Zambians get a fair return on their mineral resources.
Speaking at a Press Briefing in Lusaka today, Mr. Kalala said the Levy Mwanawasa government saw it fit to sale the mine because it was spending too much on it as the government was losing 1million US dollars per day to keep the company open.
Mr Kalala revealed that the Zambian government sold the mine for US $25 to Vendeta after the involvement of Stanchart UK and some experts while the asking price was $400 million.
He explained that sale of the mine was split into two the first being the already operational KCM which went at $25 million and the other money was to be spent on developing the Konkola deep was has since be realized and adds to the over 800,000 metric tones the country is producing now.
Mr Kalala said the sale of KCM was a tactical “Donche Kubeba” strategy where the Mwanawasa administration sold the mine but at the same time introduced windfall tax as a way for government to collect dividends from the mines.
He said Dr Mwanawasa had the vision for the country stressing that the late president knew that copper prices were not going to be good all the time and that was why he asked his team to come up with programmes where proceeds from the mines were to be invested.
[pullquote]Mr Kalala said the sale of KCM was a tactical “Donche Kubeba” strategy where the Mwanawasa administration sold the mine but at the same time introduced windfall tax as a way for government to collect dividends from the mines.[/pullquote]
Mr Kalala called on Zambians to take to task all those that participated in the removal of windfall tax for them to explain why they did so.
Mr Kalala charged that the removal of the windfall tax was criminal as it denied the Zambian people a share of the country’s natural resources.
Mr. Kalala further condemned former President Rupiah Banda for removing Windfall Tax on Mines and described the act as criminal.
He called on the public to take the people who were in charge of the country and make them tell the nation why the removed the windfall tax which had the backing of donors.
He said instead of condemning Mwanawasa and the current owner of KCM Anil Agarwal, Zambians should seat down and reflect on who to blame.
Meanwhile, the former President’s Aid has asked President Michael Sata and his Patriotic Front government why they have not reintroduced the Windfall Tax which he said was the cushion to the selling to KCM at a low price of US $25million.
He said instead of condemning Mwanawasa and the current owner of KCM Anil Agarwal, Zambians should seat down and reflect on who to blame.
PF should further be answerable to Zambians why they have not reintroduced the Windfall Tax
And Mr. Kalala has told Finance Minister Alexander Chikwanda to resign for insulting Zambians that “those calling for Windfall Tax are Lunatics”.
He said if he does not then President Michael Sata should fire him.
He advised the public not to allow the Finance Minister to continue in his office as doing so would vindicate his statement that Zambians are lunatics for calling for the re introduction of the windfall tax.
Jack Kalala can you please sit quietly and enjoy the keep bucks You received. We wont blame the levy but you who where giving useless advise. How do you feel listening to this Benchud insulting our president as if he had no advisors. As for this Govt, you have chance to make amends now tht this benchud has proudly said so. FIRST START BY GIVING LOCAL SUPPLIERS to supply instead of them choosing their fellow indian inflating invoices. You call the local suppliers are crooks, then what u gona call aba basamwya
MAYBE MR. KALALA SHOULD NOT HAVE COMMENTED ON IT. THE WINDFALL TAX AND THE VALUE OF THE MINE ARE UNRELATED ISSUES. WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IF THE PEOPLE WE SOLD THE MINE TO HAD ALSO DECIDED TO SELL IT TO ANOTHER INVESTOR AT ITS REAL VALUE? CURRENT ASSET VALUE IS NOT THE SAME AS FUTURE INCOMES OF THE SAME ASSET. THE PROBLEM THAT WE HAVE IN ZAMBIA IS THAT NATIONALS OF THIS COUNTRY DO NOT FOLLOW DISCUSSIONS GOING ON AFFECTING THEIR NATIONAL ASSETS AND WORSE, MOST MEDIA HOUSES ARE ALSO NOT CONCERNED ABOUT SUCH MATTERS BUT INSULTS AND HEALTH OF A SITTING PRESIDENT THAT THEY PUBLISH – STRANGE! THE MOST CRITICAL REASON FOR SELLING KCM CHEAPLY WAS THAT OF KEEPING THE WORKFORCE STILL EMPLOYED. THE EFFECT OF LAYING OFF ALL WORKERS AT KCM WAS GOING TO BE DISASTEROUS TO THIS COUNTRY LET ALONE DEMOS.
I always tell Sata to reconcile with Zambians, look now the citizens are even following the dead. Let the man rest in peace.
All those loans, allowing Mulenga to abuse the poor LCC, plus insults to Zambians, katwishi mwandini… its best to keep living on earth.. like Kabimba said that they are immortal.
Kalala is very much right!! Windfall Tax and/or other harsh tax regime on these mines is the way to go.
We have to blame him.He is the one who approved the 25 million dollars.He is dead but he messed up on the KCM deal.
Only one who is blind in mind can blame Levy. Mines in Chingola, Luanshya and Mufulira were dead and it was Mwanawasa who redeemed them and he introduced Windfall-tax which brought great deal of development during his reign. It was Mwanawasa who opened Kansahi and Lumwana mines during his time when late Chiluba and ba Sata sold and destroyed Kansanshi mine in NW province. Now why do you people tend to forget easily? Muletasha. I know you are a PF cadre and you can not appreciate what was done well but blame shift on others.
Ka Idah iwe basop you don’t know what you talking about.Levy messed up on KCM.
@Saulosi, why so brutal, are treating Levy same Judas, who accepted just 30 pieces for Jesus. How long didn’t it take between KCM sale to Levy’s heart-attack?
For the price to have dropped to 25 million from the 400 million asking price someone was obviously bribed. We need to find out who this was and how much they are receiving. Since SITET no longer exists Scotland Yard could be asked to help
Discounting the price on the consideration of a future investment by the buyer sounds stupid. Is it similar to buying a shirt and getting a discount on the price because you promise to launder it with expensive detergents?
I didn’t know Mr. Kalaba would defend a rightful decision. Job well done for voicing out without favor. I think our leadership needs more of his caliber when it comes to defending a just cause. One Zambia One Nation.
The problem is that its like these investors balatufyanta kumapuli by using our people against us. Just close to an election, you mau find them announcing that they will close the mine coz of no profit UNLESS such & such id reduced. So baBanda balekako Windfall for the sake of electorates with whom Sata was making noise. Eapa lelo, Sata fails to reintroduce Windfall tax knowing that fikabuka & he will lose support. Nababafyanta.
HAS MADAM HELLEN MWALE READ THIS POSTING BY KAKOLWE AND LANGUAGE USED? THOSE IN MISA ZAMBIA WHO HAVE READ THIS, PLEASE BRING IT TO HER ATTENTION. IF SHE DOES NOT KNOW WHAT THE WORD “AMAPULI” MEANS SHE SHOULD CONSULT. EVERY POSTING IS READ BY ALL CATEGORIES OF PEOPLE: THE YOUNG, THE OLD, FATHERS, MOTHERS, IN-LAWS, OWN CHILDREN, ETC AND IT SHOULD BE IN THE MINDS OF THOSE POSTING SUCH MESSAGES TO THINK THAT WHAT THEY ARE ABOUT TO POST WOULD BE READ BY ALL THESE CATEGORIES OF PEOPLE. CHRISTIAN NATION BUT FULL OF EVIL PEOPLE.
Kalumba, that’s why ba tunyantila ku MAPULI, when people like you are only concerned by people’s “journalistic freedom”, yet when evil – MASS GRAND SWINDLING such as is visited upon ourselves & brethren as well as our unborn kids & their kids, you see it perfectly right to accept it as okay becoz it is a nsamiya or muzunga doing it to you – dig yourself a grave! That would lighten our agony!!
People wake up! What ever way you look at it we lost out big time and no one should try and mislead Zambians from that fact and all those involved should be brought to book and the wrong rectified!
Too many secrets which turn out We are engulfed in the schemes of the clever ones, too difficult to understand. After colonialisation, we remained with a mind based on reacting to former colonialists and neocolonialism. What we forgot for a long time is our masters moved on to scheme other methods of controlling our minds. For instance, copper must not be bought anf sold in Zambia but it must be taken somewhere else for buy & sell transactions. They advanced financial manipulations so much that as we still agitate about neocolonialism, they are busy with small prints in contracts which our naked eyes don’t see and we end up with YES YES YES to even terrible conditions in contracts. As long as we remain reactionaries instead of being proactors and actors, we have a long way.
Just because he died we should go around looking for whom to finger point? I blame him 100% as well as the Zambian system of both the past and present! Now, you go get busy so you can clean up this mess before it spreads further, if not already!
Ba Kalala, there is no need to be afraid if what you did with your Levy Mwanawasa was transparent and in the interest of Zambia. If the chaps you were working with have never been to school then we are sorry. Public office requires very high standards of vigilance, transparence, prudence, diligence and care. That is why there are procedures and simple things like internal controls and self-checking mechanisms like having various security wings operating independently, which from day one in office Mwanawasa, yourself, Leslie Mbula, Mutembo Nchito, Mark Chona and the British compromised when you created the Task Force so as to make the entire government machinery porous so that your treacherous well planned economic atrocities against the state of Zambia could be implemented. You chaps went
You chaps went on committing one treasonable charge after another with impunity; we were just watching you all this time. All of you, together with your friends who have been protecting all and were refusing to impose appropriate taxes will be charged. What you all did is treasonable.
This was not a good deal and someone has to take the blame whether dead or alive.
Mr. Kalala…You messed up with your boss Mwanawasa. I think you received a cut from the deal. We now know you useless people are very corrupt. You just think of your relatives , children and wives. You have no hurt for Zambians. This is the same with PF as well . Why cant PF introduce windfall Tax? Is PF also eating with these infesters? Please change your thinking Zambians.
The article has not given all the back ground information. It has not mention the HIPC Initiative and the conditionalities that were involved. I explained everything. What you have here is not the full picture of what I said and stand by what was done as it was the right thing to do under the circumstances. At the end of it all Zambia greatly benefited through the debt cancellation. Let us move on and reintroduce the windfall tax.
The treason charges will be not made against you by the PF government which is being controlled by your cartel using the money you stole. We have known all along what the game has been, that this why Sata named all those buildings after Mwanawasa in order to blind ford Zambians. Sata has hiding the draft constitution, destroying the judiciary among other issues just in order to protect you criminals with your Maureen
Low price combined with windfall tax as the plan is not believable as a story. The reason why the wind fall tax had to be abandoned was that the terms of sales guarantied that there would not be any such change in taxation. So much for that story. Sounds plausible, but contrary to the facts.
Kalala must have seen the ghost of LPM confronting him ….
“Iwe ka Jacki uchita chani? Naiwe unadyako ma hafu”
“Yenda ubauze manje manje, ukachedwa uza nikonka ka!”
“I hope ka Magande keve kali zii”
I was critically following and trying to get sense and logic out of Kalala’s briefing but as soon as I hit the phrase ‘donche kubeba’, my appetite to continue just crumbled down. If anyone wants to convey anything SERIOUS, please avoid using such phrases….I cannot even express how it make me feel….actually its no better than the way Agarwal slammed us Zambians in that infamous video. The way Kalala used the phrase says a lot on what the architects of the phrase meant….
So the Levy govt was trying to do a ‘donche kubeba’ on Vedanta, meanwhile, Agarwal was also doing a donche kubeba’…… expecting a win win situation. Well as an independent adjudicator, Agarwal won by an embarrassing margin
The blame falls squarely on the late President MSRIEP. They were in a hurry to sell KCM. Look what has happened now. Jack Kalala is defending his late boss just like Magande because he benefited, please let him shut up. In fact they must have single sourced the buyer. My government PF should set up a team to review the development agreement for the sale of KCM. As a PF cadre let us ask Government to act.
Mwanawasa admin was in desperate situation and they did the right thing under the circumstances i.e loss of jobs, expense of running a shut down mine, of course political expediency was also at play. These are the facts Kalala should have expanded on instead of silly phrases such as ‘Donche Kubeba’. The Windfall tax was also a silly excuse though the principle was good. The fact is that even if the mine was sold at three times more- the govt had the right to introduce windfall tax.
It is NOT true that KCM was losing 1m usd per after Anglo left. This was the scare slogan for the entire ZCCM privatisation. Note the difference between KCM and ZCCM. From 2002 when Anglo left to 2004 when it was given away KCM had become profitable because the copper price rose from 1200 usd to almost 3000 usd. The only thing lacking was the money to invest in Konkola deep. Secondly Zambia qualified for HIPC way back in 2001 before FTJ left office. 3rdly if Anil bid for 400m, then offered 25m, why not turn his offer down and re-advertise? 4th re- introduction of windfall tax is not as simple as it is made to sound. Development Agreements shielding mining companies from such, valid for 20 years were signed by MMD govt and Kansanshi is already suing in London for breach of contract