Economist Kelvin Chisanga projects Zambia’s single digit annual inflation rate by April 2023

Rainbow News
Saturday, November 26th, 2022

LUSAKA based economist Kelvin Chisanga is projecting that Zambia’s annual rate of inflation is still likely to remain in single digit by April 2023, despite the rate rising by 0.1 percent in the month of November 2022.

Mr. Chisanga has based his projection on measures government is putting in place to reign in on inflation.

Chisanga is of the view that Bank of Zambia (BoZ) has done well in maintaining the country’s lending benchmark, the Policy Rate at 9 percentage point and how the New Dawn Administration is handling the Exchange Rate.

The economist has however observed that Zambia’s annual rate of inflation is slowly rising up owing to the festivities that comes with December and January as well as the farming season.

Chisanga notes that during this festivities and farming period there always a demand for foreign as people travel outside Zambia for holidays and the country continues to spend more in United States (US) dollars to import fertilizers for the Agriculture sector.

Mr. Chisanga has however advised, as remedial measures, that government balances how much of the grain it can allow to export and how much should be reserved as strategic reserves during this period.

Chisanga is worried that if Zambia exports more to earn foreign exchange and leaves herself food insecure, inflation is likely to go up to double digit because there will be scarcity of food, which in turn will result in food prices going up.