•BALLOONS released in the air to mark the opening of the mall

By GETHSMANE MWIZABI –

RED and white balloons in their hundreds were released to the sky. As they spread over the clear blue skies of Ndola, people, young and old, down below were caught in joyous celebrations.

Being a somewhat low tempo city, Ndola is not known for such flamboyancy, but that was a different day altogether. The occasion was to celebrate another city’s development milestone in recent memory.

The opening of the Kafubu Mall, the biggest so far recorded on the Copperbelt region has, no doubt, put Ndola on the map. It means a lot to a place that has had a fair share of its ups and downs.

Many people are familiar with Ndola‘s ugly depression of more than a decade ago when it was reduced to a ghost city.

Back then, Ndola had the largest industrial centres of Zambia, boasting of, among many high-powered sites, a Land Rover vehicle assembly plant, Dunlop tyre manufacture, Johnson and Johnson Industry but Ndola’s economy shrunk significantly between 1992 and 2000. Many factories closed up and buildings lie unoccupied in the town.

A number of former industries such as clothing and vehicle assembly have gone under completely.

At its best, Ndola had a host of production sites for such world-renowned blue chip names such as Colgate-Palmolive, Unilever, Dunlop, and Land Rover.

• KAFUBU Mall will help decongest the Ndola central business district

As property development is on the rise in the city that was once reduced to a shell, the architectural face of Ndola is changing for the better.

Like Lusaka, the development of Ndola has been rapid and extensive.

Although copper is still Zambia’s largest foreign exchange earner and the mainstay of the national economy, the city of Ndola has established itself as a commercial and light industrial centre of considerable importance, as well as being the junction and distribution centre for the Copperbelt.

The oil pipeline from Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania ends its 1700 kilometre journey in Ndola at the Indeni Petroleum Refinery.

Modern factories, offices and shops line the central business district.

A big attraction in Ndola is the annual Zambia International Trade Fair which is due in July.

Lately, there has been the opening of the Kafubu Mall, the US$20 million project, which was locally funded by Stanbic Bank, through a Private Public Partnership (PPP) between Workers Compensation Fund Control Board (WCFCB) and Kafubu Mall Limited.

As former United Nations (UN) secretary general Kofi Anan once put it, promises that matter are those which are kept. Truly, just more than a year ago when the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was signed between the two parties amid a crowd of witnesses, it appeared like a fairy tale when a promise was made to complete works in a year’s time. Now th