BA VJ BALIPWA!
Here We Go Again
A Response to the statement attributed to Hon VJ Mwaanga
By
Ernest C Mwansa ( Interim President, The Zambia We Want Party)
I read the article attributed to Hon VJ Mwaanga in the Diggers NewspaperJ of the 6th Day of October 2024 with apprehension fearing that the article could draw different reactions in many a mind, especially seeing firstly that my own initial reaction was apprehension and the first phrase that came to mind was “here we go again!” and secondly because I was concerned that in this politically polarized environment people easily misunderstand each other.
In the said Diggers Newspaper mentioned above the screaming headline is as follows: “Even if people are dissatisfied with UPND, there is no alternative for 2026 -VJ”. By this statement I understand VJ to mean that people are dissatisfied and that the current opposition is not in any state to dislodge the UPND in 2026.
The little I have come to know of VJ is that he does not use words carelessly. He is someone who once told me that diplomacy is the ability to send someone to hell and that someone takes the journey there smiling all the way. So I checked my reaction and avoided jumping to conclusions before I had thought through what the man meant.
Now VJ is one of our venerated politicians and one feels that analyzing what ever he says about the political scenario currently obtaining in our country, requires insight into the mind of this great patriot and brilliant mind so as to try to decipher the true content and the import of his statement. VJ has done a lot for mother Zambia and we must all honour his contribution to mother Zambia. We should not rush to condemn what he says without first trying to understand what he means. In any case even if he makes a mistake or misunderstand he situation those traits are common to all humanity and as such we must be restrained in our reactions and cautious with our base reactions.
I recall that at one point some politician colleagues from our great Southern Province were very unhappy that VJ stood with other patriots from other provinces to support a national cause, as opposed to simply supporting someone who hailed from the Southern Province (that person’s name is deliberately withheld as that person is not part of my narrative in this article.). Suffice to say that a few colleagues in opposition then started shamelessly denying the fact that VJ hails from the Southern Province and started calling him VJ Mwansa. I still feel sorry for those political colleagues. In the final analysis it was the position that VJ held that won the day on the Zambian political arena.
As I delve into the statement I have quoted above which has been attributed to VJ, I must say that I feel uncertain about writing a comment about what VJ has said. But we are living in times when anger is taking away our analytical minds and supplanting our minds with bitter feelings all the time. My take is that VJ cannot make such a sweeping statement without having thought through it comprehensively and patriotically.
I may be wrong in my understanding of the statement by him but I would rather voice out what I think than remain mute or continue to wander whether one of the venerated political icons of this country has lost his ability to state his position in a manner that leaves people who rush to condemn feeling insulted while the thinking minds learn intended lessons from the same statement.
But I am obligated to make my comments about his statement by the fact that Zambia is bigger than any of us, including an icon of Zambian politics like VJ. I am even the more persuaded to comment by the fact that if VJ says something one has to take time to think seriously about his comment or comments. And finally I believe that VJ made the comment believing that Zambians will discuss it.
In my understanding VJ is saying two things both of which I totally agree with.
The first part of his comment is that people are dissatisfied with UPND.
If one ignores the first two words in the statement, namely; “Even if”, then what remains is the phrase ” people are dissatisfied with UPND”. This is a fact which most Zambians readily agree with. Only the UPND government and its followers seem satisfied with the fact only that they are now in government; that they have increased the Constituency Development Fund to K30 million; that they have employed a number of teachers and health practitioners the combined number of those employed is still less than a hundred thousand; satisfied with their appetite to curtail free speech and the assemblage of Zambians by using our men and women in uniform; by using the police and the soldiers to quell the people’s constitutional rights, (we are left to wonder how many men and women in uniform the UPND has recruited to be able to be sending them on missions that have nothing to do with protecting the public from internal and external enemies).
If we take into account that our population in now about twenty million and the people in formal employment does not exceed two million then we realize how insignificant the number less than one hundred thousand employees recruited in the public sector is. UPND is happy that, it has rescheduled the foreign debt and yet in so doing they have now completely transferred the debt to generations which have nothing to do with the contraction of the debt nor the misuse of such expensively borrowed money to be paid back by future generations, those innocent generations are now the ones who will shoulder the burden of paying back the debt. The UPND government has gone down in the annals of our history that it is under their guard that the prices of the staple food skyrocketed beyond the grasp of the average Zambian. Talk about infrastructural development, the only real infrastructure they are developing is the one where it has borrowed money from Zambian institutions like NAPSA, given it to a foreign company to construct the Lusaka /Ndola Dual Carriageway and then queerly given our toll gates to the people to whom we have lent our money to construct the road and made them the ones to control the collections from the toll gates for the next over twenty years! when it comes to utilizing our natural resources particularly the mineral resources, Zambia, under the UPND watch has specialized in enriching foreign investors in exchange for foreign investors giving Zambians the lowest paying jobs in those companies and ignores or refuses to receive taxes from the foreign investors. Yes the UPND is proud of a national budget which is less than half the budget of a university, Harvard University in the USA and much smaller than the budget of Gothenburg in Sweden whose population is about six hundred thousand (600,000) people (their annual budget is about forty five billion dollars compared to us at about Eighteen Billion dollars. What is worse is the fact that the UPND has failed to grow the Zambian economy which is instead shrinking.
But our colleagues in government seem very happy with their achievements.
I mean don’t you hear them saying that they will win the 2026 elections. They keep saying to us that there is no opposition to talk about in Zambia! The fact that VJ used the same words does not change the reality that it is an old record song from a very old relic. We have heard that played by other political regimes in our country.
Should we believe that there is no opposition in Zambia? Really? I mean let us face it. Historical facts on this matter proves the very opposite. It is a fact that in 1991 our founding President the late Dr Kaunda cut his term of office to bring about a snap election. He was sure of victory against the MMD and so was UNIP generally. The idea of a snap election obviously was to make sure that MMD did not have enough time to organize itself as a viable, vibrant and an entity ready to claim victory from the mighty UNIP. Because power had by this time a corrupting effect on the great leaders , the late founding father of our our nation went so far as to promise the Catholic church that once the elections were over and he was back in office the Catholics would walk on their rosaries.
At the time the snap elections were called by KK, as he was lovingly called by many, MMD had just about a year to prepare itself for elections and to contest the elctions.But the people of Zambia had already risen against the UNIP government and they helped the MMD organize itself as a political party. And the MMD trounced UNIP so badly that the former ruling party was left, politically, with the control of only one province out of the nine provinces of Zambia then and wondering where the votes of the women had gone.
As far as I am concerned therefore it was the people of Zambia who removed the UNIP from government and not MMD. The people used the MMD as the instrumentality for the removal of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) from office.
Come 2026 I am seeing a repeat of that same feat. This is three years down the line for the UPND. If the UPND has not realized that the people of Zambia have now resolved that the UPND cannot take the country beyond 2026 then the UPND has not been studying its own historic rise to power in 2021. I need only to remind the UPND that the writing was on the wall for the PF just about two years into their last term of office that the people of Zambia had rejected the PF misrule and were resolved to remove it. What only remained was to settle on a vehicle to use to achieve the Zambian people’s goal. Zambians finally settled on the UPND and once that was done Zambians bought their time, endured the abuse of the PF cadres and police until the day of the general elections. Zambians rose en mass, braving even the night itself and queued up to wait for the opening of the polling stations. That massive turnout was, for those of us who know what Zambians do on election day when they are dissatisfied with the government of the day was a tell tell evidence that the PF was gone no matter the song “alebwelapo”!
As I write this article I am convinced that the people of Zambia have reached a point of no return with the UPND. I am equally convinced that having reached this point Zambians will certainly find the right vehicle and the. rIght people to achieve their now settled desire to correct the partial mistake made in 2021, namely the putting into office of the UPND due to their dissatisfaction with the leadership style and the undemocratic direction into which the PF was dragging the country.
So yes VJ has seen that the people of Zambia disapprove of the UPND. In saying what he has said he has warned the UPND that they are no longer the beloved party they were just before and immediately after the 2021 elections. That to live in that yesteryears belief that they are still popular is to bury their heads in the sand. That come the 2026 elections the UPND like the PF will wake up licking their wounds and wondering when their assumed popularity had evaporated.
The second part of VJ’s statement is another stark warning but this time to the opposition groupings in our country. He puts it directly that (I paraphrase) there is currently no single opposition political party with enough political muscle to single handedly remove the ruling UPND from power. We may not like the taste of this analysis from VJ but if we are true to ourselves as opposition political leaders we must say VJ’s analysis of this point is equally true. I for one again agree with him on this point as well. I mean let us face facts. Firstly the reason that PF lost in 2021 was because it lost a lot of people who did not like the leadership style of the PF. These people rejected the cadreism that had taken root in the former ruling party; they were not impressed by the obvious sudden rise of many leaders from rags to riches in a very short space of time. They were uncomfortable with the polarization of our country into regional cocoons and the open pronouncements of tribal sentiments. Because of, among other things, many who were supportive of the PF either left the Party or decided they were not going to vote for the PF. The end result was that the PF lost the elections.
This is something that has sadly continued unabated even now during the UPND’s time in office. The feeble efforts to root this vice from among us has been targeted only at the political opponent of the the UPND. On the other hand UPND cadres have the freedom and liberty to pronounce themselves on any subject including seditious ones without repercussions; to be tribal and to insult any political opponent as much as they want, including insultingly addressing their political opponents who are as old as their own parents down to their nakedness.
But in the world where I grew up a young person no matter how angry he or she would become would not dare to insult some one as old his or her parents. The logic was basically that to insult some one who was as old as your parents was in fact the same insulting your own parents as well. Such insults were treated as insults to one’s own parents and were traditionally scorned upon. Biblically speaking this position is correct because the bible urges young people to treat as fathers or mothers all those who are elderly in society.
Only a regionalist and/or an ostrich mentality would deny the fact of regionalism and selective trials of political opponents as highlighted above as being a reality during this period of the UPND in power. Zambians believe they are one Zambia one nation and they despise those who try to divide them. Zambia has also espoused Christianity and a culture of insults is anathema to our national consciousness.
So we see that the former ruling party the PF stands divided not by its own volition but by the design of those who are determined to see that party die, their sworn political opponents’. the UPND.
No Zambian should rejoice when they see a deliberate ploy to destroy a political party. We live in a democratic dispensation and any attempt to deliberately destroy another political party by anyone including the party is government is a clear warning of an emerging dictatorship! We must all fight to protect the victims of such abuses. Afterall those victims are Zambians like ourselves and the danger of remaining silent in such circumstances is that one day it will be you who will be victimized for your beliefs and others will watch with glee your persecution. We must not as Zambians fall into the trap of ” it is okay so long as it is the other person”. When we hold that view we open ourselves to be abused by those who hold power. It has been said and it must always stand true that an injury to one is an injury to all. It is for above reason that I personally demand the release of Mr Nakachinda of the PF seeing that the state has failed to charge him and the legal period within which he can be legally held in detention is long gone. The UPND must stop this malicious prosecution of opponents otherwise they are setting the snare which will one day soon catch up with them. The police they are using are not their police force but our national police service. This government must remember that whatever they are doing is being recorded by our national consciousness and will certainly be divulged against the UPND at an appropriate time soon.
Secondly, there is confusion within the remaining group in the PF. The confusion has ben created, it is my belief, by the the government of the UPND,l in its effort to undermine the perceived strength of the PF and particularly to try to undermine the political comeback bid of the former Republican President Dr Edgar Chagwa Lungu. That effort has seen a number of MPs belonging to the PF facing expulsion from Parliament and are only hanging in Parliament through court injunction orders. So we must agree that there are difficulties in the PF. We must go further and agree that the current efforts by the various political parties are also proving problematic.
Not too long ago the United Kwacha Alliance split leading to the creation of a second group called Tonse Alliance. One thing is true for both these Alliances; they both have yet to show the country their terms of engagement and how they plan to form a government of the Alliance partners. My latest latest stint and participation with efforts to create alliances was with the UPND. There was initially a bubble created and that bubble brought excitement among many Zambians but obviously the bubble had to burst to expose the emptiness and hypocrisy of those behind alliance creations. The grandiose pronouncement that proceed the formation of alliances burst in the faces of the originators leaving them stained and humiliated. I now hold a settled conviction that alliances cannot work for us in Zambia because, generally, the leaders who team up to try to form those alliances do so with underlying selfish interest. It appears to me that alliance partners at leadership level almost always focus only on becoming the leaders of such alliances. Those who are the majority in the alliances are also focused not on building the alliance but on ensuring that they underhandedly steal the support of the members of their alliance partners to boost tgeir own partisan numbers. If this trend continues until elections, then I am sorry to say that VJ could well be proven right come 2026.
Now let us move away from the challenges within PF and political alliances and consider those who left the PF because they were dissatisfied with what the PF had become. These people most probably voted for the UPND in frustration The question is has the PF taken time to try to mend fences with those who were disgruntled and or injured by what was going on in PF going into the 2021 elections? If not it means their dwindled numbers which led to their loss in 2021 elections are still the numbers they still have, or even less if one considers the fact that many political cadres follow power just to eat with those in power. Those dwindled numbers cannot therefore win the PF an election in 2026 as things stand.
Then come the many political parties which have stood for elections before. We have to admit if we are truthful that the impact of these political parties on the national psych has been less than encouraging. Most of them have no political numbers to talk about. This may not even be because they do not espouse good ideas for the development of our country. It could just be that Zambians have not warmed up to their ideals. But politics is a game of numbers and if we want to succeed we must frank and brutal about hiw we analyse polical realities. The brutal realities facing these parties is that they are unlikely to grow their support base within the next two years to effectively be viable alternatives to the UPND in 2026.
So again we see that VJ is right in saying there is currently no opposition to unseat the UPND party who currently in power, come 2026. The comment by VJ should therefore be seen as a clarion call to the opposition to sort out their differences and present a united and unshakable front to evacuate the UPND from office and land them into a political Intesive Care Unit where they will either die as apolitical party or recuperate and become an attractive political party again.
The position in The Zambia We Want Party. We agree with VJ that there is no doubt that the Zambian people are very dissatisfied with the UPND government. Of course we must admit that those who are getting direct benefits from the UPND in government will dispute this vehemently. It will not surprise me if they resort to insulting me and others who think like me because insults too is in the DNA of arrogant political parties. But truth must be told and it is this that the UPND have lost that humph that had initially attracted particularly the young generations to it. I have to say to the UPND