2025 had better be the start of good years to come. We have suffered; it is enough!- Azwell Banda

2025 had better be the start of good years to come. We have suffered; it is enough!



By Azwell Banda



By and large, we Zambians are a good natured, polite and generally happy people, no matter what our circumstances may be.

We enjoy a good laugh at ourselves, our families, and even neighbours! We respect authority and I think we generally fear government, especially the police, particularly the paramilitary police. We go a long way to avoid making our friends unhappy: unless it is someone we know very well and whom we usually freely differ with, we normally would rather skirt around a disagreement, and let it pass. We do all this to politicians, all the time. We laugh behind their backs and show them fake respect when they are looking!

It is how we behave as individuals and inside our political parties as supporters, members and leaders which bothers me. Our dictators since 1964 have also been manufactured inside their political parties and by their praise singers. UNIP under Kenneth Kaunda went as far as proclaiming that God ruled the Heavens and Kaunda ruled on Earth. “Kaunda, forever, no change” was a chant UNIP leaders, members, its zealots and Kaunda’s praise singers used to taut and intimidate their opponents, and send their leader to sleep.

Even the “One Zambia, One Nation Motto” had a dubious ending! “One Zambia, One Nation! One Nation, One Leader! And that Leader: Dr Kenneth Kaunda, Forever, No Change” thundered in all UNIP meetings, especially towards the end of Kaunda’s political life as president of Zambia. No country can have only one leader, all sane UNIP members (and all UNIP “leaders” of course) understood this! And yet they all lied to Kaunda that Zambia then had only one leader – Kaunda. As for being a leader “forever” and without being replaced, only little children play such games, in life. Adults know that things change all the time and leaders come and go; always.

This type of lying – telling a loved one, a friend and a politician a lie to make them feel good about themselves, to smooth over their errors, to defend their indefensible behaviours, to cover up their physical, social and political ugliness and so on – is a bad mistake we make all the time, most of us, Zambians. Politicians have turned this type of lie into a political staple food: the consequences are deadly as the majority of Zambians pay the price of enduring political mediocrity, liars, corruption, thieving, fraud, incompetence, authoritarian and dictatorial leadership, in Zambian governments.

Zambians die for want of food and medicines in hospitals, while ruling party politicians are showered with praises and their corrupt and other errant ways are smoothed over, by their praise singers. It is hard to tell who is worse or more evil: the politician in government who is corrupt, a thief, a fraud, a liar, an incompetent nincompoop, an authoritarian figure and a dictator or his or her praise singers? Both act in tandem to defraud Zambians and they send thousands of Zambians to their early graves. To fail to acknowledge that it is immoral and a mistake to cover up for bad and criminal behaviour by our politicians makes us accomplices in the punishment, suffering and deaths which such politicians unleash on the majority of Zambians. When “our” political party is in government, most of us are guilty of this mistake.

Even the most hard-bitten poor Zambian, young, male or female, educated or uneducated, generally thinks very highly of himself or herself. Funny, our material and cultural poverty notwithstanding, we Zambians are generally extremely opinionated, assume we know a lot about everything, are nowadays too impatient to read, think, discuss with others, learn, before jumping headlong into mindless action. We are a very proud people, you see. We have now reached a stage in our political life when most of us think we too can be the president of Zambia. Political parties have mushroomed all over the place, all of them formed solely to provide a vehicle for the founder, the owner of the political party, to contest elections for president of Zambia.

Zambia is saturated with potential presidents and yet there are no clear solutions to the problems now killing Zambians every day, coming from any of them, including from the politician now in power. They all are competing at manufacturing the most convincing lies to win elections if they are in the opposition, or to fool us, if they are in government. None of them are talking about transferring economic and political power from our elite politicians to the mass of the Zambian people who, for 60 years now, have been victims of lies, false promises, corruption, theft, fraud incompetence, authoritarianism and dictatorship, from all our elite politicians. In their chests, all the presidential hopefuls have contempt for the one currently in office, just as he had contempt for whoever was in office when he was in the opposition! This kind of empty-headedness-pride is a bad character we Zambians need to urgently attend to.  

We are in a hurry to get somewhere, very fast, without a vision, a mission, all inspired by a programme from which objectives, strategies and tactics are beaten into a costed, timebound, measurable plan. A particular, and very unique ignorant arrogance motivates us, pushes us, to act mindlessly as if we somehow have all the controls of the world at our fingertips. There is no substitute to hard, long, bruising hard mental labour learning about the world we want to change, what change we want to make, how such change can be made, before jumping into the fray for the scramble for the office of the president of Zambia. Such a one, no matter how long they spend in the opposition, from day one, all things simply fall apart, including the little accidental good work his predecessors left. In the absence of a scientific plan to transfer economic and political power to the Zambian masses, the looting, plundering and corruption quickly take over, for personal enrichment. This mistake has brought us to where we are, as a country: we are on our knees, begging, while our natural wealth powers the development of other countries.

We all pretend to hate corruption, stealing public money, lying, and so on. And yet Zambia is a very corrupt country, with thieving politicians who lie their way into government. If we all truly hated corruption and acted upon it, if we hated the abuse and theft of public resources and acted upon it, if we all demanded the truth from ourselves and our politicians, lying would not be the main political currency our politicians use to defraud us of our votes. We are corrupt, and so our politicians are corrupt. We are thieves, and so our politicians are thieves. We lie easily, even when there is no need, and so our politicians lie too, and so it goes on. This is another bad mistake we make: we want a corruption, thieving, lying free political ecosystem and yet we are thoroughly corrupt, thieves and liars, most of us!

Most of us want every one we know, those we are related to or we love to jump when we are in trouble, and come to our rescue. And yet we do not really know, respect, take responsibility and care for others, for our relatives and those we pretend we love. Above all, we want our politicians “to work for us” when they are in government, and yes, so too must the opposition! We long lost the humane touch, human solidarity, genuine empathy and sympathy for others, we no longer actually know how to feel compassion for anyone – and yet we want society to jump when life grabs us by our throats! This is an unforgivable mistake: we all need each other, we are social beings, we humans! We must always “do unto others as we would have them do unto us”! Money and greed have replaced human solidarity, kindness, compassion, caring and love for others. We are thus the walking dead; empty, soulless, human shells.

We want to have more than anyone else. We are greedy for money, for things. We hurt very badly whenever anyone prevents us from acquiring things – and we go for them, we fight them to revenge! We gossip and say bad things about almost everyone. We are so slimy and slippery, so untrustworthy we long lost the ability to voice out our true thoughts and feelings to those around us. Politicians know all this all too well: you cannot trust anyone any more, not even your wife or husband, in politics in Zambia today! We thus no longer “commune” (relate humanly) with others; we transact, we trade, we exchange “value” for “value”. We are zombies, long dead inside and a cold selfish stone now lodges where our heart should be. This is horrible. It is a mistake, a grave mistake, to be driven by these evil things. 

In our families, churches, schools, businesses and political parties – we are witnesses to many injustices but we do nothing about them. We try very hard to stay clear of such troubles. In political parties, we see and hear bad things done by our leaders against others, and we keep quiet, and sometimes even compete and pray for the opportunity to take over the positions left by those unjustly treated by our politicians.

We all know that Israel has normalised genocide as a state response to real or perceived threats to the state; we say and do nothing, about this. We hear about civil war in the DRC, Sudan and many other parts of Africa. We hear about rumours of war in neighbour, Mozambique. We are quiet. When these things will happen to us, the world will be quiet too. This is a horrible mistake we frequently make, and yet soon it will be our turn to suffer similar or worse injustices. Meanwhile, our politicians have turned our government into a sjambok for whipping their opposition.

For 60 years now, we have suffered because most of us, Zambians, make these and many similar mistakes. The past three years have been particularly horrible, worsened of course, also by the drought. Going forward, in 2025 and beyond, if we want to end our national suffering, we must confront these personal and collective mistakes, and deal with them, frankly and brutally. The choice really, is ours. Happy New Year!



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