North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat, and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported on Tuesday, in a rare and very public broadside against apparatchiks at the opening of a critical factory.
Vice Premier Yang Sung Ho was sacked “on the spot,” according to the state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), in a speech in which Kim attacked “irresponsible, rude and incompetent leading officials.”
“Please, Comrade Vice Premier, resign by yourself when you can do it on your own before it is too late,” Kim reportedly said.
“He is ineligible for an important duty,” he added.
“Put simply, it was like hitching a cart to a goat — an accidental mistake in our cadre appointment process,” the North Korean leader explained.
“After all, it is an ox that pulls a cart, not a goat.”
Nuclear-armed North Korea, under multiple sets of sanctions over its weapons programmes, has long struggled with its moribund state-managed economy and chronic food shortages.
Kim has been quick to scold lazy officials for alleged mismanagement of economic policy, but such a public dismissal is very rare.
Touring the opening of an industrial machinery complex on Monday, Kim blasted cadres who have “for too long been accustomed to defeatism, irresponsibility and passiveness.”
Yang was “unfit to be entrusted with heavy duties,” Kim stated, according to KCNA.
He urged a quick turnaround in the “centuries-old backwardness of the economy and build a modernized and advanced one capable of firmly guaranteeing the future of our state.”
Images released by Pyongyang showed a stern-looking Kim delivering a speech at the venue in South Hamgyong Province in the country’s frigid northeast, with workers in attendance wearing green uniforms and matching grey hats.
– Lazy officials –
The impoverished North has long prioritised its military and banned nuclear weapons programmes over providing for its people.
It is highly vulnerable to natural disasters, including floods and droughts, due to a chronic lack of infrastructure, deforestation, and decades of state mismanagement.
The new machine complex forms part of a large machinery-manufacturing belt linking the northeast to Wonsan further south, “accounting for about 16 percent of North Korea’s total machinery output,” according to Yang Moo-jin of the University of
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