North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has dismissed his vice premier and publicly denounced “incompetent” officials during the opening of a key factory, state media reported Tuesday.
Vice Premier Yang Sung Ho was sacked “on the spot”, the state-run Korean Central News Agency [KCNA] 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.
Nuclear-armed North Korea, which is under multiple sets of sanctions over its weapons programmes, has long struggled with its moribund state-managed economy and chronic food shortages.
Kim publicly dismissed officials for mismanagement and blasted cadres for “defeatism, irresponsibility and passiveness” during Monday’s industrial complex opening, a rare public rebuke.
Yang was “unfit to be entrusted with heavy duties”, Kim said, according to KCNA.
“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.”
And 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”.
