HH and ECL, for both their own good, must meet, talk, smoke the peace pipe, unite; to make way for a new economic and political order in Zambia- Azwell Banda

HH and ECL, for both their own good, must meet, talk, smoke the peace pipe, unite; to make way for a new economic and political order in Zambia



By Azwell Banda,



Clearly, at the end of the road for his disastrous sponsorship of the Miles Sampa efforts to implode and destroy the Patriotic Front (PF) and Edgar Chagwa Lungu (ECL) himself, it appears Hakainde Hichilema (HH) now wants to change his strategies and tactics: he has signalled that he is willing to meet his opposition and even sit down and talk to Edgar Chagwa Lungu, apparently to make peace.

Many Zambians, some quite very well-meaning but still wrong, especially among those from our Christian community, have pleaded with Hichilema to forgive and move on, make peace with Edgar Chagwa Lungu, and urgently show “leadership” in attending to the many desperate needs of the majority of Zambians. Hichilema has stubbornly refused to do so, on both fronts.

Hakainde Hichilema has been singularly focused, in the past three years of his only reign, on delivering on his agreements with the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the US and its Western allies and all those who sustained his politics when he was in the opposition and funded his election victory in August 2021. Hakainde has not missed an opportunity to remind Zambians, now that he is in government, that they should expect relief in their suffering when he would have grown the Zambian economy. He has in fact boasted that his aim is to “double” Zambia’s economy (whatever the hell this means).

Rarely has a man and his group of friends dogmatically steeped in the now thoroughly discredited and discarded neo-liberal doctrines of the so called “Washington Consensus” ever walked the face of the earth, or ruled any country, such as are Hichilema and his zombies in his Cabinet. In the very short space of just three years, and thankfully the only term of office Zambians will ever allow him, Hichilema and his zombie Cabinet have, with reckless arrogance, pretended that they are “unleashing Zambians” upon a revolutionary road to make Zambia a right-wing free market economy, complete with the domination of “private investors” as the “drivers of economic growth and development” and “main creators” of employment.

Having recklessly subsidised the export of our strategic maize reserves, over-privatised electricity including through a reckless purchase programme from private electricity producers, electricity export drive and introduction of “cost reflective pricing” of electricity, “liberalised” and removed subsidies from fuels, chaotically begun to dismantle FISP – the government support programme to impoverished rural farmers, artificially pushed up the local price of maize by cruelly and without any thought to national incomes and employment levels, rewarded their international friends and themselves in the mining and other key economic sectors with government subsidies in the form of lowered or removed taxes, and many such anti-Zambia, unpatriotic and thoroughly anti-economic development measures, is Hichilema now slowly waking up to the horrors he has unleashed upon the majority of Zambians?

More than 700 Zambians have died from cholera, hundreds have been buried alive in unsafe, unlicenced and government unsupervised mines, more than nine million Zambians now struggle with hunger all the time while 6.6 million are actually starving, and facing famine. Mass unemployment continues to chock the lives of the majority of our population who are young people eager for work and who should be bustling with life. In this grim situation, the drought has simple compounded all the problems the majority of Zambians face.

It is true, as Fred M’membe of the Socialist Party says, Zambia’s economy has collapsed: ours is the perfect, most accurate definition of a “collapsed economy”. To be fair, this “collapse” has been long in the making – some whooping 33 years this year. The majority of Zambians have been pushed into our extremely impoverishing informal sector where they struggle to prevent death, every day. Today load shedding is wiping out thousands of such economic hustlers and survivors’ “businesses”. Water shortages make matters worse. For the majority of Zambians, their lives now are the next closest experience one can have, about hell.

Hichilema, his zombie Cabinet and his praise singers meanwhile have all the time over the past three years relentlessly touted, mocked, insulted, bullied, and used all kinds of racist filth to apparently “motivate” Zambians to become “capitalists”, “investors”, “hard workers”, “opportunity grabbers” and so on and so forth. Hichilema himself shamelessly praises himself and quite rudely says he “works hard”, he is not “lazy”, implying that the majority of Zambians are lazy, and this is why they are hungry, unemployed and poor, while he is rich. Is there some “softening” to this extremely offensive and thoroughly insulting attitude from a politician and his zombies who promised to solve the problems of the majority of Zambians by simply “fixing” their problems, lowering the cost of living and doing business, promoting democracy, human rights, rule of law and respect for our Constitution, none of which has happened?

Is sanity slowly dawning on Hichilema and he is beginning to smell, sense, feel, read and see the burning mass anger among the majority of Zambians his aborted election promises and his unleashing of pure hell on Zambians have caused? I hope so. Millions of Zambians are looking for signs of some sanity, humanity, some recognition, genuine sympathy, empathy and urgent political leadership from Hakainde and his zombie Cabinet, over their untold suffering which the UPND government’s fawning, ingratiating and quite moronic application of failed IMF and World Bank neoliberal policies have caused them.

It is pure insensitivity for the current plight of the majority of Zambians, extreme political arrogance and the daring of a politician and his zombie supporters too drunk on their feeling of power and impunity, extreme hubris, what Hichilema and the UPND government are doing, by unconstitutionally and criminally creating nine constituency by-elections which they know they can illegitimately “win”. Of course, Hichilema needs to assure his foreign business supporters and funders that he will stay in government long enough to mature his and their investments in Zambia. To achieve this, our Constitution, rule of law, democracy, parliament, the executive and many state institutions must be soiled and weakened. Hichilema has in fact quietly on several occasions said that it is “difficult” to “support democracy” on a poor economy. And yet all normal people know and understand that “Democracy” is in fact how power in society is managed all the time, but especially in bad, tough economic times, if society is not to explode in violence. Only proto-fascists treat their people as imbeciles, invalids, and therefore “recipients” of “government tolerated and allowed democracy” and government “permitted” human rights from their dictatorial governments. “Democracy” are the many sided assemblage of processes, institutions, regulations, rules, laws, constitutions and human behaviours to enable the management of human economic, social and political relationships in society, to avoid society eating itself up: “Democracy” is certainly not a “gift” especially from a cold, selfish and right wing unpatriotic capitalist such as Hichilema and his zombie Cabinet.

Hichilema and his zombie Cabinet must free MP Emanuel Jay Jay Banda and drop the fake charges they have saddled him with. They must allow the police to arrest his named abductors, try them and let “the law” take its course. Hakainde Hichilema must know they are playing with fire over the nine constituencies they have declared fake, unconstitutional and criminal vacancies. They must swallow their pride; leak their wounds now that their hopeless, reckless and quite lunatic stooge, Miles Sampa, has gutted them by returning to his “natural home”, the real authoritarian and dictatorial PF. More importantly, Hichilema and his friends must not just speak carelessly about “no Zambian will die from hunger”: Hichilema’s UPND government must publish weekly updates of their countrywide work to get food to desperate Zambians. No sensible Zambian, not even honest members of the UPND, trust Hakainde Hichilema to tell the truth about our hunger situation: Hichilema has a problematic and tenuous relationship with the truth, all truth.

Hichilema must hurry, arrange to meet with all the opposition leaders, with the real Patriotic Front, and Edgar Chagwa Lungu himself: they must lower the political temperature in the country to prevent civil strife in which it will be the lives of young Zambians all of them have made their contributions to impoverish, lives which will be lost should civil war break out in Zambia. Hichilema and his opposition and Edgar Chagwa Lungu must in fact unite; they are the same apart from their tribal and regional support bases. This way they may clear the political scene in Zambia for long overdue new and superior political energies to energise.

Zambia has had enough of the rotten, costly, thoroughly backward and retarded politics from politicians such as Hichilema and his zombie Cabinet, Edgar Chagwa Lungu and his dictatorial PF with its one-party dictatorial state UNIP plagiarised constitution. The only way Zambia can avoid the looming bloody political disaster, is if HH and ECL meet, talk, smoke their peace pipe and unite, so that it becomes easier for Zambia to move past this crop of disastrously hopeless, destructive, lying, corrupt and undemocratic politicians.



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