SEOUL, Jan 30 — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un laid out ambitious plans yesterday for major construction projects across the country in the coming year, including public health facilities, leisure complexes and industrial plants to be built in 20 regions.

“We are now standing on the starting line of our gigantic struggle for another year, aimed at transforming the regions,” Kim said in a speech cited by the official KCNA news agency early today.

Completion of the envisaged construction programme “means that nearly one-third of the cities and counties across the country will have been transformed,” he said.

Kim’s speech comes ahead of the landmark congress of North Korea’s ruling Workers Party — its first in five years — which is expected to convene in the coming weeks.

“I am sure that our Party, whose political ideal is the people-first principle, will continue in the future to tap all potentialities for regional development,” he said.

Nuclear-armed North Korea has a fragile economy and its government has long been criticised for prioritising the military and its banned weapons programmes over adequately providing for its people.

The leadership’s regional development policy, pushed by Kim two years ago as a necessity for “levelling up” living standards of rural areas, is tacit acknowledgement of the major disparity in conditions between the showcase capital Pyongyang and the rest of the country. — AFP