LAST week, two statements came out of government which, taken together, left us scratching our heads. On September 10, the Food Reserve Agency announced that it had signed a contract with Kenya’s Baita Trading Company Limited for the export of 540,000 metric tonnes of maize. Two days later, Secretary to the Cabinet Patrick Kangwa addressed the nation and warned that about 1.2 million people risk facing severe food shortages between October this year and March 2027. The warning was not about some distant danger three years from now. It was about hunger beginning immediately.   We do not know how ordinary Zambians managed to reconcile these two developments, but as a newspaper we struggled to find the logic. On one...