SHAMELESS ELECTORAL FRAUD
It’s self-deception for Mr Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND to celebrate and fool themselves that they have been winning by-elections. They have not been winning; they have been purchasing and stealing elections.
They have been dishing out huge amounts of money, mealie-meal, maize, fertilisers, and so on and so forth. This is spiced with violence, intimidation, and threats. Poor voters are threatened with removal from the social cash transfer lists if they don’t vote for them. Financially desperate voters are threatened with removal from CDF loans or grants lists if they don’t vote for them. They collect their voters cards and NRCs and assign UPND cadres to “assist” them vote.
Mr Hichilema and the UPND are completely annihilating our electoral process. The credibility of our elections is gone. These by-elections are nothing but a huge fraud by political fraudsters.
We participate in these fraudulent by-elections not necessarily to win them; they give us an opportunity to interact, communicate, and discourse with our people.
But what happens when elections are fraudulent and discredited in this way?
They seem to think and behave as if the only democratic procedure for people choosing their leaders were THOSE fraudulent electoral processes, so often prostituted to falsify the will and the interests of the people and so many times used to put into office the most inept and most shrewd, rather than the most competent and the most honest. As if after so many fraudulent elections, as if after so much false and treacherous politicking, as if after so much corruption the people could be made to believe that the only democratic procedure for a people to choose their leaders were these fraudulent electoral procedures.
And as if any other procedure were not democratic – procedures through which a people choose their leaders not with a pencil but with the sacrifices of fellow compatriots.
When the electoral process is a fraud, people will think outside the box to express their will. They become more revolutionary in their thinking and approaches.
Realities do not arise in the world through someone’s whim. Revolutions, real revolutions, do not arise by the will of one person or one group. Revolutions are realities that obey other realities. Revolutions are remedies – bitter remedies, yes. But at times, revolution is the only remedy that can be applied to evils even more bitter.
Fred M’membe
President of the Socialist Party
