Minister of Housing and Infrastructure Development Ronald Chitotela says Zambia is not the same as it was 10 years ago because of how much work the ruling party has put in.

He was responding to a question from Mazabuka UPND member of parliament Garry Nkombo who insinuated that the PF was a failure in terms of infrastructure development yesterday.

“Under MMD, we had periodic reports of Infrastructure Development Plans in the ministries of health, education and indeed roads. I want to know from you, since you said you had no immediate plans to do this road from Nangoma because of budgetary constraints and we also know that there are instances where you have budgeted for a road project, financed part of it, as the case is on the Mazabuka township roads and I am sure you did make reference to the Minister of Local Government regarding that, when will you harmonise your works so that the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and come up with a summary of a workable infrastructure development programme for roads so that we do not ask you this question, we just look and see where you have succeeded and where you have failed because currently, all we see is failure,” said Nkombo.

But Chitotela boasted that people gave credit to the PF because it had transformed the country.

“Mr Speaker, if somebody would grade PF in terms of infrastructure as failure, then they don’t want to see because if you speak to the commoners out there where they give credit to PF government is in terms of infrastructure development. Everybody is able to see that the Zambia we had 10 years ago is not the Zambia we have today, Zambia has drastically improved in terms of infrastructure development,” Chitotela said.

He said he could not force Nkombo to see success when he had already decided to see failure.
“Depending on which side of the coin you are, if you want to see positive, you can see it. If you want to see failure, even when it is blue, other people see green Mr Speaker so I can’t tell you to see success if you have chosen to see failure and each year Mr Speaker, we do produce the infrastructure annual work plan and that is the more reason why His Excellency the President did amalgamate all the infrastructure programmes in one ministry so that we can have a consolidated infrastructure report being done because previously, we had seen a lot of ministries doing insfrastructure programmes and that became a challenge in terms of monitoring and supervision. Now as regards to annual reports, RDA produces their annual work plan and the progress report, I believe this year, if it has not been circulated, it is undergoing scrutiny so that once it is circulated to all the members of parliament in form of the annual report, it is that which government accepts and it gives the status of where we are, what we have done and what we intend to do,” said Chitotela.