As Viphya Forest, commonly known as Chikangawa, continues to face massive depletion, the Parliamentary Committee on Natural Resources suspect, foul play between government and concessioners in the plantations.<\/p>\n
This follows the committee\u2019s discovery that some of the investors in the forest are mismanaging their allocated concessions with no appropriate action from the Forestry Department.<\/p>\n
For instance, during a fact-finding tour to the plantation last week, Chairperson of the committee Welani Chilenga and fellow parliamentarians were startled with developments in the AKL Timbers concession area.<\/p>\n
The committee was shocked to learn from AKL\u2019s Plantation Manager, Peter Phakali, that out of the six thousand hectares allocated to them in 2009, the company has not managed to replant most part of the area.<\/p>\n
During the interaction, Phakali and Harvesting Manager Far id Khan continuously contradicted each other on several issues with Khan insisting that the company has in the six years of operations replanted over 1,400 hectares.<\/p>\n
A visit to their area revealed vast area of bare land covered in natural shrubs and tree stumps, evidence of extensive timber harvesting.<\/p>\n
But Khan attributed the bare land to wild fires.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere is something fishy going on because all they are doing is harvesting without any replanting, this is not how an investor should manage a concession. If anything let the bare land be given to others who can manage instead of leaving it bare as it is,\u201d Chilenga said.<\/p>\n
Chilenga said his committee in tends to recommend to government to revoke licences of all investors who are failing to manage their concessions.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are giving them time to gather all the information that members asked for, should they fail to provide all that, we will not hesitate to ask government to terminate the contract. Because they are here to deplete our resources,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Additionally, Chilenga said his committee is equally irked by reports that some members of staff in the Forest Department are involved in the unscrupulous deals of forest products.<\/p>\n
Speaking in a separate interview, Director of Forests Clement Chilima admitted of the developments but said his office faces challenges in probing the cases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Viphya Forest, commonly known as Chikangawa, continues to face massive depletion, the Parliamentary Committee on Natural Resources suspect, foul play between government and concessioners in the plantations. This follows the committee\u2019s discovery that some of the investors in the forest are mismanaging their allocated concessions with no appropriate action from the Forestry Department. For […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":33066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33062","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33062","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33062"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33062\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33067,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33062\/revisions\/33067"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33062"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33062"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33062"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}