“REDUCE LOAD SHEDDING HOURS FOR MILLERS”

UNITED Party for National Development (UPND) National Youth Chairperson Gilbert Liswaniso has appealed to President Hakainde Hichilema to direct Zesco, a power utility firm, to reduce   hours of load shedding to milling companies to avoid the shortage of mealie-meal in the country.

Zambia has been hit by the prevailing drought situation prompting Zesco to start implementing the 8-hour load schedule per day.

But the UPND National Youth Chairperson wants positive discrimination against milling companies by only load shedding them for two hours instead of eight hours.

Speaking in an interview in Lusaka, Mr. Liswaniso said there was a need to cushion the cost of production for millers by load shedding them for only a few hours if they were to produce mealie-meal in large quantities.

“I am appealing to my President, the Ministers of Agriculture and Energy to work on load shedding to millers for them to be able to do their milling without impediments so that we at least don’t have mealie-meal shortages,” Mr. Liswaniso said.

He regretted that mealie-meal production had gone down due to load shedding, adding that the milling companies he had visited had complained that their production net had dropped significantly.

“I make this passionate appeal because I go to millers to check what is happening and they have complained that for the past seven days, there is a shortage. They used to produce 1000 to 2000 bags of mealie-meal per day but now they are only producing 400 bags because of load shedding.

“So, I am appealing to President Hakainde Hichilema that while this is a huge challenge, we could manage the situation by first allowing millers more hours of production. We must find a way on how we can minimise load shedding on our millers so that they can offload many bags on the market,” he said.

He said the drought had compounded the economic malaise which was affecting every Zambian adding that the drought catastrophe is not an invention of the UPND Government but assured that the ruling party was working round the clock to address the challenges.