DANGER OF A SINGLE STORY – A CASE OF MR EDGAR CHAGWA LUNGU

Authored By Mupishi Jones

Those who chose to believe a single story without listening to the other side of the same story,are likely to arrive at wrong conclusions.Always remember that every story has two sides.

The danger of meeting, chatting, dining, walking, planning with the same people and faces everyday,24/7 is that you start sharing the same fears,you start telling each other what you want to hear, you start believing in what you discuss everyday and eventually you start thinking and convincing yourselves that it is what every citizen is thinking out there! You lose yourself, you lose your critical thinking,you lose your objectivity and rationality and eventually you become out of reality.

You start believing that what you are doing is very right and in the best interest of everyone and yet not. That’s the same thinking that gives rise to extremism either political or religious extremists.

Since Mr Edgar Chagwa Lungu lost power in 2021,he has been meeting, discussing, dining, walking, jogging with the same people and faces everyday 24/7 who contributed to his humiliating defeat from power. Today the same people and faces have convinced Mr Lungu to convince himself into thinking that Zambians wants him back into power, he’s convinced himself that the majority citizens made a mistake to vote him out of power and that now they’re regretting. That is what is driving him to behave and talk the way he is talking today.He has convinced himself that he was a far much more better leader than President Hakainde Hichilema and that even his worst as a President cannot much President Hakainde Hichilema’s best performance.Thats what believing in a single story can do, delusional thinking.
Mr Lungu doesn’t believe that the brutality of his regime was lethal because he was surrounded by the same people and faces everyday 24/7 who were telling him what he wanted to hear only and not the truth.He doesn’t even believe that a citizen like Lawrence Banda,a young man full of life was gunned down to death in cold blood by his personal barberman during political by-election campaigns in Kaoma when he was the commander in chief of all the security wings in this country.Mr Lungu doesn’t believe that the brutality of his regime extended deep into compounds were innocent citizens were permanently maimed by his political cadres .To hear that there are a lot of citizens within Lusaka who never set foot into Intercity for the whole duration of his term in office because they were suspected to be supporters of the opposition especially UPND,Mr Lungu thinks these are just fairytale stories aimed at denting his image….. effects of a single story.
I don’t think Mr Lungu thinks citizens like Mapenzi,Nsama and others died in cold blood through the brutality of his regime.If you tell Mr Lungu today that his PF cadres were more powerful than the state police, he’d simply laugh at you and accuse you of scandalizing him.
That’s the level of how isolated Mr Lungu has become from the realities of his brutal regime.

He is complaining of shrinking democratic space and yet he is free to speak from anywhere anytime without even constantly looking behind his shoulder the way his friends were running through rooftops of radio stations .I doubt if Mr Lungu knows that from the time UPND assumed office,there has been no organized political attack on any opposition political party from the UPND cadres, there’s been no closure of private radio stations, there’s being no political fights at burial sites, there’s being no political violence in either bus stations or markets! I don’t know whether he has forgotten that equally UPND had raised lethal political party cadres capable of handling and repelling the attacks from PF cadres when they were in power and that these UPND cadres are still around except under restraint? Mr Lungu is a lucky African politician who ascended to the presidency without ever setting foot in a police cell.He inherited the presidency through a sympathy vote when President Sata died midterm.His second term was marked with a lot of controversy.No wonder his exit was a historical and unprecedented defeat. He is even lucky that the current President is extremely tolerant.I’m sure even himself he knows and it’s the reason he’s riding on.

The bitter truth is that Mr Lungu was running a very brutal regime more than any other regime in the history of this country.Just like a fish under water doesn’t know whether it’s raining up there, its equally normal for Mr Lungu and his colleagues in PF not to believe that their reign was full of terror because they were the perpetrators of this and usually beneficiaries of a cruel system do not see anything wrong with their system.

Mr Lungu and his colleagues in PF might be rightly so,pointing at a number of projects that they did when in power as justification for their come back.However what they do not realize is that in the eyes of many citizens, those projects are nothing but painful reminders of how government and political leaders can steal from the very citizens they purport to be serving.It is an indisputable fact that Mr Lungu and his colleagues in PF collectively became richer than the government that employed them within their term of office.

Mr Lungu was and he’s still the creator of the problems which he wants to pretend to come and solve today.
Let him come out of his old circle of PF friends and see the reality from a neutral angle…..no normal citizens can miss his regime….. zero!
I submit

Mupishi Jones
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