President Lungu to Visit Uganda, Saudi Arabia

Tomorrow President Lungu continues on his endeavours to accentuate Zambia’s diplomatic identity in the Great Lakes Region as he visits the Republic of Uganda. The President will be in the midst of several Heads of State and dignitaries attending the inauguration of President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni.

While in Uganda, the President will also engage his colleague in trade talks under the Comesa Region umbrella and trade structures. Zambia seeks to deepen economic diplomacy with the Republic of Uganda as we recognize the need to understand new topics in international trade and new forums of economic diplomacy as envisaged by trade groupings like Comesa to which both Zambia and Uganda belong. In recent years, the Comesa Region has continued to achieve growth rates of around 5%, well above the world average of around 2%. The region, however, still relies heavily on the production of primary products such as tobacco and groundnuts with big investments of capital intensive extractive industries concentrated only in a few countries.

There is, therefore, a strong need and opportunity for the Region to embark on a wider diversification from production of primary products to non-primary and preferably processed products if the Region is to realise continued upward growth trends. Such diversification will lead to job creation, partly solving the unemployment problem that the region experiences. Thus our President’s talks with his colleague in Uganda will seek to draw sharp focus on ways in which our two countries can derive maximum benefit from the Comesa Region trade structures and further enhance our unique comparative advantages so as to create jobs for our two peoples.

PF