Zambia is in a dangerous interregnum: the old is refusing to die, the new is struggling to be born
By Azwell Banda
Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND may just be the unwitting midwives of the economic, social and political revolutions Zambia needs, post the 1991 MMD betrayal of the Zambian working class and rural poor masses.
The naive and dangerous recklessness of their handling of our national food security, electoral system and the cruel abandonment of our national sovereignty to the IMF may just be the combined measures the majority of Zambians need to appreciate the urgent imperative for Zambia to abandon our rotten, thoroughly corrupt and backward periphery capitalist system. What is happening in Zambia is a perfect mirror image of what is happening in the entire global capitalist system: the world capitalist system is thoroughly rotten, corrupt, pregnant with right wing extremism including hatred of immigrants, morbid racism: it has entered a dangerous period in which all imperialist powers are arming themselves to re-divide the world among themselves again in order to save their national economies and societies from collapse.
The unresolved 2007/8 global financial crisis has been boosted by the pandemic and its disruption of the world capitalist economy. The massive drop in global production and disruption of value chains by the pandemic, massive injection of paper money in the national economies of the world during the pandemic which merely served to make stock exchanges, banks and the tech billionaires richer while fuelling global inflation, now worsened by the US, NATO and EU war against Russia in Ukraine have all combined to sharply raise global inflation, the prices of oil, gas, fuels, fertilisers, electricity, food, rent and the general cost of living, globally. The world’s working class and poor peasants have never had it so bad! There is no sign of any new radical economic thinking to avoid the global economic recession now already well under way. The systemic and structural crises of the world capitalist system are also acute moral, intellectual and ideological crises of the world’s capitalist and imperialist system: apart from making the world military, defence, industrial and financial system richer through wars, neither the US nor the EU has any alternatives to wars, to cause their economic systems to ride the recession. China, India, Russia, Brazil and the rest of the non-Western world are equally morally, intellectually and ideologically bankrupt: they too are stoking the fires of capitalist wars by refueling the global war economy, by boosting their military and defence budgets. The world is on the blink of the Third World War.
You may not believe me, that’s fine. Here, however, is what António Guterres – Secretary General of the UN – said on Tuesday this week, the 20th of September 2022, in his address to the UN General Assembly, about the state of the world:
“We need action across the board. Let’s have no illusions. We are in rough seas. A winter of global discontent is on the horizon. A cost-of-living crisis is raging. Trust is crumbling. Inequalities are exploding. Our planet is burning. People are hurting – with the most vulnerable suffering the most. The United Nations Charter and the ideals it represents are in jeopardy. We have a duty to act. And yet we are gridlocked in colossal global dysfunction.
The international community is not ready or willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age. These crises threaten the very future of humanity and the fate of our planet. Crises like the war in Ukraine and the multiplication of conflicts around the globe. Crises like the climate emergency and biodiversity loss. Crises like the dire financial situation of developing countries and the fate of the Sustainable Development Goals.”
If you apply just a little thinking to this speech, you will see Zambia in it, described very accurately. We Zambians, all of us, must have no illusions: Zambia is in dangerous rough seas. We need action now to reduce the suffering of the majority of Zambians. A summer of discontent will soon be upon us. The cost-of-living crisis is getting out of hand. Zambians have lost trust and faith in our politicians and government. Zambians are hurting. We claim to be a Christian nation and yet there is no social and economic solidarity, especially with the working class and the poor. We have an acute financial crisis. Our government is impotent in the face of our many crises, and it has handed over Zambia to the IMF.
We have been voting since 1964. We have ploughed through several constitutions, including a One-Party State Constitution. Apart from moderate reforms, our government system still has an all-powerful executive in the President, a rubber-stamping National Assembly of executive wishes, and a judiciary also largely beholden to whoever for the moment is President of Zambia. This pathetically wrong system of government in a desperately poor newly independent African country without a solid native national economy was bequeathed to us by our dear departed racist colonisers, the British.
Zambia has a small neo-colonial economy with deep roots in its colonial mining economy and its supply side industries. Backward rural agriculture continues to be the largest source of economic activities for the bulk of the population. Zambia has an insignificant manufacturing sector. Our energy sector continues to be wedded to mining, and supplying electricity to the few but congested urban centres. Real high value economic activity in Zambia is owned and controlled by foreign exploiters, euphemistically called “foreign investors”. Most of our rural landscape is still in the dark ages, literally. From the mid-1970s to date, Zambia has suffered severe budget constraints leading to a crippling debt burden today. With the deterioration in the economy, and an ever-growing population, poverty, unemployment and inequalities have exploded.
For 58 years this year, it is inevitable that in such a prolonged climate of national suffering, corruption, lying, thieving and criminal national mentality, cultures and practices have taken root, everywhere in the country, complete with a rotten parasitic small capitalist and political class, administered and sustained by an equally ever rotting government system. Chronic widespread urban and rural unemployment and poverty feed perfectly well into our national mentality and culture. The IMF agrees that we are one of the world’s most impoverished and malnourished country. Our government bureaucracy is indeed corrupt. Our political and economic system cannot guarantee a normal life for its urban and rural slaves, the Zambian working class. They starve every day.
It is in this climate that HH and the UPND have decided to re-invite the IMF to administer our economy and finances, on behalf not of Zambians, but our creditors and global financiers and banks, and themselves. The IMF must make us debt sustainable, with a stable monetary regime and inflation rates fit for extracting maximum value for our creditors. In return, we grow our debt by the new debt from the IMF itself, and give up our sovereignty.
It is in this climate HH and the UPND are messing with our food security by clearly manipulating the fertiliser system for themselves, and messing with the farmer support programme to make government savings. The UPND has demonstrated how far they can go to ensure electoral victory for themselves by their behaviour in the Kabushi and Kwacha by-elections: by playing dangerous games with the Electoral Commission of Zambia.
As it happens, one of the political clowns at the heart of the by-elections crisis has in fact already been arrested for electoral malpractices including corruption, and the other one could not simply dissolve doubts about his grade 12 certificate, in court. Both, however, served in the extremely corrupt government of Edgar Chagwa Lungu which defrauded the masses out of billions of kwacha and incurred a debt now threatening to drown the country into higher forms of suffering and misery, and possible political violence. Both are continuing guests of our criminal investigating wings, and courts, for corruption.
Unsurprisingly, our lumpen petty capitalist political class as a collective and its legal community have sprung into action defending the clearly failed electoral system of transferring power among themselves, and ignoring the elephants in the room: our neo-colonial Constitution and the electoral system have failed, 58 years after independence, to deliver the masses of Zambia from poverty but they have promoted liars, thieves and the corrupt into government.
As António Guterres – Secretary General of the UN – said about the state of the world, in Zambia too, we are not willing to tackle the big dramatic challenges of our age! We are refusing to destroy the old, and give birth to the new. We are in a dangerous interregnum. What is struggling to be born is the organised cleansing and purifying power of the working class and rural poor people of Zambia, to sweep away the power of our corrupt, lying and thieving petty capitalists and their politicians, and their misrule of the country.
HH and the UPND appear poised to be the unwitting midwives of the explosions to come.
Comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com.