Fouzi Lekjaa has heard enough about middlemen.
For years, he told a PAM campaign rally in Taourirt on Tuesday, rising prices have been explained away by pointing to the intermediaries standing between producers and consumers. With households still paying more for basic goods, he said, that answer no longer cuts it.
“It is unreasonable that, for so many years, the answer has remained to blame intermediaries,” Lekjaa, a member of PAM’s political bureau, told the gathering. “Citizens are waiting to see a tangible impact, not repeated justifications.”
He described the continued rise in prices as “abnormal” and said bringing basic goods back within reach of families had to come before arguments about why they had become expensive in the first place.
The attack on high prices gave Lekjaa’s Taourirt stop a sharper edge to a purchasing-power message that has followed him through much of PAM’s campaign for the September 23 election.
The party has already made the cost of living one of the main planks of its program, with Lekjaa arguing at earlier stops for changes to distribution networks and a smaller gap between what producers receive and consumers eventually pay.
In Taourirt, his emphasis was on results.
Major investment and development projects would mean little, he argued, if families did not feel the improvement in their own lives through jobs and the cost of what they buy every day.
The same issue has surfaced repeatedly during the campaign. At the CGEM last week, Lekjaa argued that the problem lay partly in the way agricultural goods move from farms to consumers, questioning margins along distribution chains and calling for greater regulation without abandoning agricultural exports.
