FRED M’membe says politicians must learn to argue with facts and figures.
Dr M’membe is the Socialist Party president.
In a statement issued from his Garden compound office yesterday, Dr M’membe said politicians must attend to the quantitative aspect of a situation and make a basic quantitative analysis.
He said every quality manifested itself in a certain quantity, and that without quantity, there could be no quality.
“To this day many of our politicians still do not understand that they must attend to the quantitative aspect of things – the basic statistics, the main percentages and the quantitative limits that determine the qualities of things,” Dr M’membe said. “They have no figures in their heads and therefore cannot help making mistakes and wrong conclusions. Let’s learn to argue with facts, figures; let’s learn to have a head for figures.”
He added that it was: “crass dishonest” to claim that President Edgar Lungu was a blessing and has brought good to Zambia.
On Wednesday, The Mast carried a lead story where Lusaka Province PF secretary Kennedy Kamba claimed that President Lungu was a blessing to Zambia who has brought good and not misery.
“This claim is wrong because it agrees neither with facts over the years of Mr Lungu’s presidency, nor with the social facts, statistics so far known to us,” Dr M’membe argued, adding that rural poverty in Lungu’s presidency is at 76.6 per cent.
“The three poorest provinces of our country – Western, Luapula and Northern provinces – have poverty levels of 82.2 per cent, 81.1 per cent and 79.7 per cent respectively.”
He said Zambia’s maternal mortality rate was 213 deaths/100,000 live births, infant mortality rate stood at 56 deaths/1,000 live births and physicians density or doctor ratio is nine doctors/100,000 population.
Dr M’membe added that Zambia had a death rate of 11.6 deaths/1,000 population.
“Is this the good, the blessing Mr Lungu has brought us?” Dr M’membe asked. “The truth is the history of humankind is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. That is what dialectics teaches us. And this process is never-ending.”
He said in any society in which classes exist, class struggle would never end.
“The struggle between truth and falsehood will never end. Zambia’s problems are complicated, and our brains must also be a little complicated,” Dr M’membe said. “Today our population is 17,426,623 (July 2020 estimates) and at our current population growth rate of 2.89 per cent (2020 est) in the next 15 years our country’s population will more than double.”
He asked what life would be like for doubled Zambian population in 15 years, in terms of food, water, sanitation, housing, education, health, transportation and so on and so forth.