Dundumwezi UPND member of parliament Edgar Sing’ombe says his constituents have decided to abandon animal dip tanks because they are too expensive and have instead opted for direct spraying of livestock.

Speaking during a Public Discussion Forum organized by News Digger and OSISA in Choma last Friday, Sing’ombe explained that one dip tank costs around K150,000, which was not feasible due to limited resources.

“What I have done to avert this severe hunger, through the CDF, which…is also hard to come by, from 2018 CDF, we have done two pilot projects. We are doing away with the dip tanks, which are so expensive. To do one dip tank costs about K150,000, but a spray can be done within K20,000. To (apply) chemical in that dip tank, you need K4,000, while the spray, I dip my animals in a month [and] I use K140 for about 100 animals. So, we have put those things in place around the constituency so that we do away with these expensive things that government seems not to see,” Sing’ombe said.

He added that while youths in the area were being encouraged to venture into livestock farming, access to a stable water supply remained challenging.

“We have irrigation dams. We have put up fencing wires. We have also encouraged most of our youths to go into livestock farming. But again, it is an issue of water. So we cannot talk about hunger without speaking about the water shortages that we have. We have rehabilitated a few boreholes, but we would want to see commercial boreholes in the constituency. If we can have commercial boreholes per ward, it mean our animals will survive…in Kenya, [they] have machinery that can drill boreholes up to 600 metres, but here in Zambia, we are still talking about 50 metres! A driller comes and drills 70 metres and they tell you that ‘sorry, we have no water’ and they go back. For how long are we going to complain? God gave us what I would call ‘fairly enough’ but I think we did not take advantage. Most of the water has gone without harvesting it,” complained Sing’ombe.