North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has fired his vice premier, compared him to a goat and railed against “incompetent” officials, state media reported yesterday, 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,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said, 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.
Photo: Korean Central News Agency / Korea News Service via AP
“He is ineligible for an important duty. Put simply, it was like hitching a cart to a goat — an accidental mistake in our cadre appointment process,” Kim said. “After all, it is an ox that pulls a cart, not a goat.”
Nuclear-armed North Korea, which is under multiple sets of sanctions over its weapons programs, 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 complex on Monday, Kim blasted cadres who for “too long have been accustomed to defeatism, irresponsibility and passiveness.”
Yang was “unfit to be entrusted with heavy duties,” Kim said.
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, with workers in attendance wearing green uniforms and matching gray hats.
Impoverished North Korea has long prioritized its military and banned nuclear weapons programs over providing for its people.
It is highly vulnerable to natural disasters, including floods and drought, due to a chronic lack of infrastructure, deforestation and decades of state mismanagement.
The new machine complex makes up 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,” Yang Moo-jin of the University of North Korean Studies said.
Kim’s public dismissal of Yang mirrors past cases such as Jang Song-thaek, Kim’s uncle, who was executed in 2013 after being accused of plotting to overthrow his nephew, Yang said.
The North Korean leader is “using public accountability as a shock tactic to warn party officials,” he added.
Pyongyang is gearing up for its first congress of its ruling party in five years, with analysts expecting it in the coming weeks.
Economic policy, as well as defense and military planning, are likely to be high on the agenda.
Kim last month vowed to root out “evil” at a major meeting of Pyongyang’s top brass.
State media did not offer specifics, although it did say the ruling party had revealed numerous “deviations” in discipline — a euphemism for corruption.
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