FRED SHOULD STOP INSULTING POOR PARENTS BENEFITING FROM FREE EDUCATION. IF HE CAN AFFORD EXPENSIVE SCHOOLS , NOT EVERY ZAMBIAN PARENT AFFORDS. I SAID IT THAT THE ONLY THING HE CAN MANAGE IS PROPAGANDA , WHICH BASICALLY MEANS LIES; NOT INTELLECTUAL DEBATES .
By Mark Simuuwe
See the Propaganda I was talking about yesterday ; I saw Fred M’membe , in his latest article cheating poor parents who are not paying school fees and examination fees that there is no free education.
A clear lack of intellectual debates , lacks in his writings as I indicated in my earlier article . Check countries like Germany offering free education if they are buying uniforms and books , yet it is free education.Even Cuba and Venzuela which are socialists are not doing what M’membe is writing about in the article.
Check Norway and Sweden if they are buying books and uniforms. M’membe is a clown. This is a serious embarrassment to the opposition. China only has free education from primary school to grade 9 only for rural areas .
He should also find out why government has increased the school feeding programme in rural areas under Ministry of Community Development . Am sure M’membe is blank and does not know .
He says pupils and students can’t go to class when they are hungry due to expensive mealie meal ; this view is similar to the PF view and I want to ask what logic was there in the PF scrapping off meal allowances if they knew that students needed to eat, especially that Mealie meal was already expensive from k37 to k280. This is how propagandists reason . Their reasoning is lopsided and they do not check their past programmes .
Since M’membe supported PF policies, has he imagined what students , who now have meal allowances which him and his counterparts scrapped off , could have been eating ?
Secondly, Fred has no manifesto – he wants to copy the UPND free education policy just like PF attempted to do , especially after he heard that government was contemplating taking it to tertiary institutions, during the budget presentation for 2023 .
I am not surprised because that is what PF attempted to do when they took over power ; they said they were introducing free education up to grade 7 . M’membe was one of them before they were flashed out together with Kabimba . Can he tell the nation if they were buying uniforms and books for pupils. Lies have short legs and this is what I was talking about . The Post Newspaper covered this education policy adjustment and called it free education.
M’membe is one of the people who drafted the PF manifesto and you can clearly see what M’M’membe and his friends ended up doing to the economy. When PF won elections at the time of Sata, the first thing M’membe did was to rush to get contracts in the mines which are run by capitalists; he had trucks there . Then later called himself a socialist after making money from the capitalists in the mines .
The biggest sponsors of the Post Newspaper, Sangwapo advertisement page were the private companies , who are the capitalists. Then in order for him to get funding from proponents of socialism, he calls himself a socialist today and begins cheating young ones who do not know how he got where he is himself .
Some poor youths are not asking him why he cannot let them also make money the way he did before talking about socialism. He had to become a capitalist for him to make money . What am I trying to say here ; what am saying is he talks of government running companies or Nationalizing Companies but he is not telling youths that if government did that at his time , he wasn’t going to make money through the Post Newspaper and mines; as Newspapers were going to be state owned . He had to run a capitalist company in order to make money . All private companies are after maximizing profits . They are capitalists . Unfortunately, Fred can’t tell his poor youths who do not know this .
China is now undergoing reforms and they have introduced an opening -up policy for Foreign Direct investment – moving towards the market economy ; starting with Shenzhen and Shanghai as key FDI provinces . And these provinces have so far proved to them to be the way to go . This is part of what am studying here . Their argument is that they had to nationalize before opening up . And for them this is working .
Back to free education ; It is difficult to tell a parent in the village who is a farmer that there is no free education simply because mealie meal is expensive and that government is not buying uniforms and books . Which parent can listen to you ? This is why voters are doubting their messages whenever we have elections.
Fred should know that many parents do not have the money that he has and when they are told that they will not pay anything for their children ‘s school apart from buying uniforms and books for their children, he does not know the level of excitement among parents .
For avoidance of doubt , Fred should know that when UPND took over leadership, the pupils who accessed education on aggregate was only between 5million to 6million but immediately free education was brought , the number immediately and sharply went up and the aggregate this year stands at 10million .
This is why some pupils went to sit on the floor in some schools because initially they were kept away from school . What that means is that over 4million parents had no capacity to pay school fees and Fred should stop mocking these parents through his propaganda.
Today , there is an influx of pupils in schools who were not going to school because parents could not afford .
It is the same Fred who said free education was a hoax before the elections . He said UPND had no capacity to provide free education.
Thank UPND , because we came with a framework for running the country based on research. So , along side free education, we are making desks locally using Zambian timber and this has also inspired hope for carpenters in Zambia ; they now have market . It is no longer government getting the contracts for timber but they are being given to citizens and this is also creating jobs .
Further , through CDF , as programmes on free education are well coordinated, classroom blocks are being built . Fred can’t see how structured our approach to education is .
In addition to that , we are employing teachers in big numbers every year which never used to happen.
When UPND came in , there were about 122,000 teachers across the country. Today teachers stand
at 150,000 in less than 2 years across the country. All these are well planned programme with a proper framework in place .
I am not sure whether Fred does his homework before he posts something .