Wusakile Member of Parliament Pavyuma Kalobo has said that calls by the Zambia Chamber of mines to further lower taxes in the mining sector amounts to economic sabotage because such a move would not help Zambia on its development path.
Speaking yesterday during the opposition Patritic Front (PF) Members of Parliament (MP)’s weekly media interaction, the Wusakile Lawmaker said Zambia’s economy is dependent on mining and if such calls were to be entertained the country would lose out on revenue collection.
Mr Kalobo said that fair taxes in the mining sector can help the country pay its debt if the Zambia Chamber of mines were to provide good advice to the multinationals that are running the mines as opposed to them championing the interests of those running the mines.
“To the contrary, Zambia Chamber of Mines has proved to be a lobby group that thrives on lining the pockets of multinationals at the expense of Zambians,” he said.
Mr Kalobo said that the idea of privatisation in the mining sector was to attract Foreign Direct investment into the country but what has been seen is a failure on many of the objectives.
“The questions that we should be asking ourselves are, have we collected fair taxes from the mining sector, have we addressed the issue of unemployment, have we secured even the jobs that existed at that time? The answer is no. These questions, if they cannot be addressed, then what is the point of giving these mines to these investors? Then we are not benefitting as a country, ” he said.
“We just made mineral royalties deductible in the 2022 budget, will giving further mining tax deductions help Zambia to balance its budget?” he asked.
Mr Kalobo further wondered why the Zambia Chamber of Mines was finding it difficult to understand that development can only be attained when the government collects fair taxes.
They should not play to the gallery, because what the Zambia Chamber of mines is attempting to do is to take away bread from the poor Zambians by advocating for lower taxes that should not be allowed”. he said before adding that failure to collect fair taxes will lead to failure for the country’s budget to be balanced.
WHO PUT THOSE TAXES THERE IN THE FIRST PLACE ?
Please do not pay attention to this organisation called Zambia Chamber of Mines, it only serves the interests of its subscribers who happen to be the mines ; it wouldnt care less about Zambians if all mines paid zero tax. It has never called for sustainable soultions for all stakeholders or cleaner mining operations its all about just taking and depleting their own children’s resources.
Zambia chamber of Mines is useless. I wonder what there mandate is?
For sure they are ad good as a chamber.
We have a puppet kind of government that only values foreigners… Zambians have become second class citizens in their own country… Judas Iscariot is bad news…
Well spoken sir
People commenting here know nothing about the mining sector. Higher taxes doesn’t mean better lives for zambians, if that were so, we had 10 years of high taxes under PF & yet the country went down the drain. Higher taxes resulted in Congo, which has low taxes beating us in copper production under PF government. We are simply not competitive with the current taxes.