Hichilema and the UPND are turning Zambia into a “post-truth” country! They shall fail- Azwell Banda

Hichilema and the UPND are turning Zambia into a “post-truth” country! They shall fail

By Azwell Banda

The past two Fridays, I have said I had decided to write Hichilema three open letters. Below is the third open letter:

Dear Mr Hakainde Hichilema,

In this, my last of the three open letters, it is about the truth, lying and false promises, I want to talk to you about. It is common knowledge that many good Zambians, some of them your admirers and supporters, have pleaded with you to own up, confess that you lied and made many false promises, concede that now that you are in government, you know things better, and understand them differently and must confront the realities as you found them, now that you are “government”.

Others have even pleaded with you, long before the drought, that you must actually start preparing Zambians for even more tougher times ahead. All their words have fallen on your deaf ears. I do not agree with all those who have spoken and begged you to confess that you lied and made false promises, if having done this, you would then be morally free to pursue your ill feted neo-liberal, pro-Western, anti-Zambian economic and social policies. You were not elected to make yourself and your friends, Americans, Europeans, Russians, Chinese or any other people rich: you yourself actually said Zambians would come first, in your government, when you were in the opposition.

A confession and an apology from you and your entire UPND party will only be meaningful, morally sound and politically appropriate if it is also simultaneously accompanied by a rejection and abandonment of your ruthless and vicious neo-liberal, pro-colonial and pro-Western imperialist economic, social and international policies. You know very well that without this, the majority of Zambians will easily see through your apology and confessions for what they would be: fake. And so, you have logically, and wisely too, refrained from confessing and apologising for your lies and false promises.

Anyone least familiar with what the god, religion and ideology of the neoliberalism you and your political party worship will know that at the heart of yours, and your political party’s beliefs, is, as Ngugi wa Thiong’o so well says in his seminal tract titled “African Identities: Pan-Africanism in the Era of Globalisation and Capitalist Fundamentalism”: capitalist fundamentalism. Ngugi wa Thiong’o says, about this capitalist fundamentalism: “This capitalist fundamentalism, what some scholars dub neoliberalism, begins, roughly, with the Reagan, Thatcher, and Kohl era, though the threesome did not create it. It literally calls for the worship of the market, with the common credo of privatisation: Privatise or perish, it says. If a nation deviates from the ordained path, for instance by questioning the disciplinary mechanisms of ‘aid’ conditionality or failing to privatise public enterprises and introduce narrowly defined forms of liberal democracy, then it faces excommunication from the global capitalist temple and expulsion into purgatory.”

This is what I fear you believe in, and worship. Most good Zambians who admire capitalism do not know this, about you. Many Zambians just wonder why you talk too much; they have no clue that in fact you see yourself as the Capitalist High Priest in Zambia who must preach national and individual salvation through this capitalist fundamentalism, clearly a religious system, in which the capitalist market is the god-mediator of all things on earth. A central pillar of this capitalist religion is “economic growth”. You have clearly stated, publicly, on several occasions that the capitalist economy must grow first, before the weak, the vulnerable and poor can be taken care of. Essentially, the rich must get richer first before the poor, weak and vulnerable can be attended to. Unfortunately, the majority of Zambians are poor, weak and vulnerable, and most cannot wait but die, before the rich can have enough wealth to throw some of it at them.

You and your friends in the UPND, long before you won elections in August 2021, begun plotting with your masters at the IMF, in the World Bank and in the US and Western capitals about how they would put Zambia under their surveillance when you would be in government. You agreed to implement punishing austerity measures, deregulation and liberalisation of investments and trade, and strict monitoring, surveillance and control of our national finances by the IMF and the World Bank. Our odious national debt was the perfect weapon you and the West and their global managers of their world capitalist and imperialist finance system used to hand over our national sovereignty to the West and its finance institutions.

Thus, you secured the free reign of finance capital in Zambia, as you and your friends became its agents to collect bribes, rent and commissions; becoming extremely rich in the process, compared to the majority of Zambians, who would sink deeper into poverty. But there is a problem: you got into power having promised to drastically lower the cost of living for the majority of Zambians. You even promised to lower the cost of doing business, for Zambians too. You knew very well none of this was going to happen. But, you salivated at the prospects of massive wealth you and your friends would accumulate, even if the majority of Zambians sunk deeper in penury and suffering. You promised more democracy, human rights and freedoms too – all which are impossible to honour if you worship fundamentalist capitalism!

And so you must make the majority of Zambians believe that life is better now, than it was under the Patriotic Front (PF) government. You need to make Zambians celebrate regular government employment, partial decentralisation through expanding the Constituency Development Fund (CDF), and perfectly normal and ordinary government increased funding to education politically marketed by you and your political party as “free education” and university food allowances, among other mass bribery which cannot conceal the harsh social and economic environment for the Zambian masses your surrendering our national sovereignty to the IMF/WB, debtors and donors has unleashed.

The national hunger your reckless and corrupt handling of poor rural agriculture and maize has unleashed has now combined with a drought you were well ahead of time warned about to cause a giddy concoction of severe food, water and electricity shortages, among many other harsh things. But, you see, in the natural disaster the cover you need: you are now preaching that food insecurity and electricity insecurity amounts to national insecurity! Thus you are concocting the biggest lie you have ever made thus far: Zambia is faced with a severe national security threat as a result of the impact of the drought, not your capitalist fundamentalism and surrendering our national sovereignty to the dictates of capitalist and imperialist finance capital! You have the perfect cover to use state draconian measures including the police and army, to supervise hungry and angry Zambians now clearly most are angry with you and your lying political party.

You are forcing on us a country bathed in lies, untruths, and false promises. You are normalising telling pure lies in politics and therefore in every aspect of our lives, as politics is about power to make decisions that impact everyone. You are force feeding Zambians false narratives about how tough our lives would have been had the PF won the August 2021 elections. Your ministers mimic you, faithfully, and parrot-like always start their sentences “His Excellency President Hakainde Hichilema” blah, blah, blah. What do you think our children who have mountains of social media evidence of the lies and promises you made when in opposition think the word “Excellency” means?

You are a “democrat” whose government has effectively banned opposition parties from holding public political events with their supporters and members. Everyone in Zambia knows the UPND is also behind the mess Miles Sampa is causing in the PF. You have caused the Speaker of the National Assembly to follow your deceitful political ways, causing her to violate the Zambian Constitution. And yet you and your party celebrate that you are “democrats”! Are we supposed to reject the ever growing evidence of authoritarianism, constitutional vandalism, authoritarian manipulation of state processes, police party-militia like behaviour, corruption and many other things we hear about and see happening under your watch?

The truth is fundamentally grounded in material reality. In other words, the truth is not subjective or malleable; it is rooted in the objective conditions of society, including economic relations, class dynamics, and historical development of human societies. Your attempts to distort or manipulate the truth for the benefit of finance capital ultimately cannot alter the underlying material conditions: Zambians know what you said to get into government, and they know what they are going through right now, and who has made things worse for them. Your efforts to create a Zambia without the truth, a “post-truth” Zambia in order to protect and advance the interests of finance capital and those of your Western backers and praise singers, will fail.

No doubt you have mobs of blind supporters, followers and praise singers. But so too have all dictators in the world, now and before you. They all fail to win against the truth. You will not succeed to manufacture false consciousness among the masses of Zambia so that they start to pretend they have fed, when they are hungry, they have employment when they are chronically unemployed, their children are in school when schools are chaotic mass gatherings of hungry children, marriages are collapsing under the weight of a collapsed economy while you advise counselling, and so on. It is your turn to eat, now, using the government. This shall pass.

Send comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com