THE MAST COMMENT FOR TUESDAY OCTOBER 29, 2024
Has UPND learnt anything from the PF downfall?
Wisdom is a virtue required in leadership at every level. It entails reading and understanding the times and seasons.
And one can only do this if they look to the past, contrast it with the present and plot the future. If a leader or organisation ignores the past then they are set for failure. And the biggest plan for failure is thinking that you cannot learn anything from your predecessors no matter how bad you think they were – that whatever they did was all failure. This is a wrong notion which a wise leader should never have. It is not true that there is a regime that records complete failures in its existence.
Having read local and world politics, we can say with confidence that even dictatorial regimes have recorded successes in some areas, which have made a good portion of citizens miss them. Mention any dictator you know of in the world and some citizens they governed will tell you about some political and economic successes they scored which are still missed. And those that succeeded them probably have failed to achieve anything apart from blaming their predecessors. In the process they also start copying the mistakes of their predecessors and even escalate them.
This is what is happening in Zambia today. While UPND promised to do away with every mistake the PF made they have ended up copying everything and escalating them. Further, the UPND have, for example, stiffened laws they promised to repeal and replace. Just consider the cyber crimes and cyber security Act which Hakainde Hichilema as an opposition leader promised to remove once in government, but his government has ended up strengthening it. This is the law he said was dictatorial, that it had taken away the remaining platform for freedom of expression which citizens enjoyed – the cyberspace. Now he is planning to worsen it in the name of protecting the same citizens who he is squeezing. Why? Because of political greed. Hichilema and his UPND want to squeeze the little space citizens are left with. While PF allowed citizens to enjoy internet space, UPND has come to wipe out everything. They are not happy that after compromising most of the traditional media institutions, including the once critical self-styled investigative media institutions, UPND has now moved to cyberspace. They want to shut down podcasts because the owners are hosting sources the UPND do not like. And now they want to use the Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) to charge for platforms they do not own. IBA doesn’t own Youtube, Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp for them to seek to control these platforms. These platforms already have what they call community rules that control their users. There is therefore no need for the UPND to poke its dictatorial nose in other people’s businesses.
What a shame!
It reminds us of Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr who observed that, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
That is why social worker Joseph Moyo is saying that the UPND did not learn anything from the downfall.
“The UPND needs to know that power is a temporary, given by the people and the power is withdrawn by the same people. The UPND spent a long time in the opposition and it was long enough for the UPND to learn and graduate with flying political colours to understand the dos and don’ts. But what we see is that they did not learn anything and slowly cadres are harassing people and taking over markets and bus stations,” said Moyo, a feminist. “The UPND has not graduated. They are still in the class but unfortunately, it’s too late, the exams are coming soon in 2026 to see how they perform. The PF refused to listen to the people,
today we see the UPND under President HH on the same path of distraction. I thought when you spend many years in the class it qualifies you to understand and have knowledge more than what the other people may have and, in this respect, I’m saying you can be spending all the years in the opposition and not learn a thing. This should have helped them and equip them with the know-how and understanding.”