Leaders of the West and their puppets globally are moral invalids, intellectual midgets and political hypocrites

Leaders of the West and their puppets globally are moral invalids, intellectual midgets and political hypocrites



By Azwell Banda



Our beleaguered, and clearly out of depth President Hakainde Hichilema joined his friends in the West and elsewhere in the world, in condemning the attempted assassination of former US president Donald Trump.

“We in Zambia are saddened by the attempted assassination of former president Donald Trump. Extremism, anarchy, criminality, and lawlessness have no place in any society. The rest of us in the world join the USA to condemn this criminal act, and to learn lessons for the future. We wish former president a quick and full recovery,” wrote Hichilema on his Facebook wall on the day of the attempted assassination last Sunday.

Hichilema’s short statement is devoid of any sympathies for the other real victims of the attempted assassination on Donald Trump: one Trump rally attendee died, two others were injured and the loved ones and parents of the assassin – 20-year-old Thomas Mathew Crooks – who was shot dead by the US Secret Service. Hakainde Hichilema’s statement reeks of moral cretinism, acute intellectual starvation and political hypocrisy of the highest order. 

In just under three years, Hakainde’s government has fanatically and with the zeal of neoliberal extremists pursued International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Word Bank (WB) economic and social policies with their deadly austerity measures, anarchically dismantled our national food reserves among other anarchical conduct, unconstitutionally and criminally dealt with our natural resources including copper, sugillite, gold and others among other criminality, and allowed corruption and other lawlessness to prevail in our police and other law enforcement agencies, state chambers, parliament, judiciary, and the executive itself. The effects of the past three years of Hakainde’s unconstitutional, criminal and corrupt misrule have all combined and now reduced Zambia into the world’s hungriest, most impoverished, unequal country with an explosive national unemployment crisis as the fuel, electricity, water and high costs of living and doing business crises worsen. Zambia, since Hichilema and his equally morally and intellectually challenged UPND took over government has collapsed into a heap of a mountain of an economic crisis, an employment crisis, energy crisis, a fuel crisis, a water crisis, a food crisis, and many other crises, all now combining and pushing Zambia beyond a moral and political cliff, and possibly into mass civil chaos and violence. 

Sex for food has become normal, with jokes about “Room 18” concealing the nationwide hunger and social crisis pushing women into transactional sex and outright prostitution. Little girls as young as 12 are struggling to use their tiny bodies to make money for food at home. Young boys as young as 11 are becoming “junkies”. Mental illnesses are up, explosively. Suicides are up exponentially. Illicit and cheap alcohol and drug addictions are rising explosively, especially among Zambia’s young people, who are the majority of Zambians. All crimes especially violent ones, are up. Murders, gender-based violence, domestic violence, rape, burglaries, abductions and so on all are rising, and fast, as hunger and mass national poverty grips the nation.

All these national pathologies are a direct result of Hichilema and his UPND friends pathological and fanatical adherence to IMF/WB policy prescriptions and their stringent austerity measures. How much, and how long, must Zambians suffer, and how many Zambians must die, before Hichilema and his fellow morons in government realise that it is morally indefensible to pursue any economic or social theory/policy or vision at the expense of human life? No economic policy is worthy killing one Zambian in order that “future Zambians” may live in unproven prosperity. Such shallow and acute intellectual and moral poverty is what has no place in today’s world of extremely advanced AI powered science and technology, and how to predict the impact of policies on human beings. It is unconstitutional and criminal to recklessly pursue policies which are killing citizens if one took a vow to protect and defend Zambian lives and our Constitution. The UPND and Hichilema are an unconstitutional, corrupt and criminal gang using the Zambian government to pursue their own personal economic and financial interests.

It is none other than Dr O’Brien Kaaba, our former very bright, intelligent constitution defender and fighter and “public intellectual” during the Patriotic Front (PF) government days, still a teacher of law at our prime university, UNZA, and currently serving as a board commissioner (appointed by Hichilema of course) on the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) board who has so eloquently exploded the myths about Hichilema’s fight against corruption and the criminality going on at the ACC, other law enforcement agencies and in our state chambers.

O’Brien Kaaba has ably exposed State Chambers as being at the forefront of looting: “State Chambers are in the forefront of cutting corrupt deals and facilitating corruption. This has put all law enforcement agencies in an awkward situation as state chambers ought to be an ally in fighting corruption. No serious crusade against corruption can yield fruits when the heart of the legal machinery for government is contaminated. The level of corruption is sickening, to the extent that state chambers are the ones looking for litigants to sue the government and pre-agree to settle or enter consent orders involving huge sums of money. The scheme has been perfected to the extent that some orders are now signed using judges outside Lusaka to avoid public scrutiny and media attention in Lusaka. The president needs to do two things: a) dismiss his senior legal advisors and b) either set up a commission of inquiry or authorise a special audit into all the high value payments authorised by state chambers in the last three years,” says Kaaba in his statement elaborating on the goings on in the Hichilema government’s fake fight against corruption. “The level of corruption is sickening, to the extent that state chambers are the ones looking for litigants to sue the government and pre-agree to settle or enter consent orders involving huge sums of money. The scheme has been perfected to the extent that some orders are now signed using judges outside Lusaka to avoid public scrutiny and media attention in Lusaka.”

Is Hichilema such a dimwit that he thinks we do not know that he knows about all this, and has allowed it because members of his political party are the beneficiaries and perhaps, he too, Hichilema, is onto the racket too?

Kaaba says: “It is a mistake to expect ACC to be an effective tool for fighting corruption in its current form. It is a captured institution. The forces that are ripping off the state resources through state chambers also have their stranglehold on ACC. It is no wonder the media has been reporting that the ACC management has simply cut off the board from decision making at the ACC. If the media reports are true, the ACC is not accountable to its board but to the same corrupt elements looting public resources. This suggests the capture is so complete and corruption reigns with impunity.”

The “capture” is complete because the Head of State and appointing authority, Hakainde Hichilema, has allowed his appointees to go on a free looting spree. Kaaba knows this. Why is Kaaba not directly fingering Hichilema, the appointing authority under whose watch and nose this “sickening corruption” is going on?

O’Brien Kaaba is a decent and principled man, an intellectual and a good academic. He has impeccable credentials as a “public intellectual” especially in defence of our Constitution and against government abuses of our rights. He has a conscience, still intact, even as he works in the belly of the corrupt Zambian government beast. Like most well-meaning people, it is clear Dr O’Brien Kaaba was fooled into believing much of what Hakainde said when he was in the opposition, especially about fighting corruption and criminality in government. Well, O’Brien has now learnt first-hand, from direct experience, that Hakainde Hichilema lied about corruption and his opposition to criminality in government. Hichilema is a thoroughly corrupt man, and president. 

If O’Brien has the information he has gathered, what more does Hichilema know about this sickening rot and corruption in his government, given that Hichilema must regularly receive reports from our state security and intelligence apparatus, all law enforcement agencies including the ACC, Drug Enforcement Commission and the Zambia Police? The relevant members of Hichilema’s Cabinet also must regularly brief Hichilema about the corruption in his government. Hichilema has another layer of informers on corruption in government, past and present: all his thousands party appointees in government desirous to protect their boss.

It is irrational, inconceivable, and totally unbelievable that Hichilema may know less than what O’Brien knows about the sickening levels and forms of corruption in the Hichilema UPND government. O’Brien is too intelligent to believe that “the boss”, Hichilema, is ignorant of this sickening corruption in government. Does O’Brien truly believe that Hichilema does not know this, that “The UPND government went to town denouncing the former DPP under President Lungu’s tenure when it discovered that she had entered into settlements immunising some of the individuals accused of serious acts of corruption. This partly explains why the government instituted her removal. Yet in less that three years, the ACC has entered in more scandalous settlements with some of the people accused of the most heinous acts of corruption (sic). The media has been reporting a shocking trend where the ACC simply asks suspects to return just a fraction of the loot and keep the rest while the suspect is given immunity from prosecution. Using this mechanism, ACC is basically allowing both PF and UPND aligned officials facing serious accusations of corruption to buy off their freedom, using the same resources looted from the public. As long as one is willing to give a cut, they are let off. Are the people who think that ACC is now preoccupied with finding people with big loot, immunise them and share the loot not justified? It is clear that the provision allowing the grant of immunity is being abused.”

I don’t not think so. Dr O’Brien Kaaba needs to complete his recovery from being duped by HH: he must now publicly acknowledge that Hichilema cannot, is not, capable of leading the fight against criminality in our government. Hichilema is part of the systematic and structural corruption capitalism survives on, in government. Kaaba is too intelligent and morally sane to suffer from irredeemable and terminal cognitive dissonance. His students and admirers expect him to stay principled, consistently. This path is costly, at a personal level: is Kaaba ready to pay the personal price for principled consistent opposition to criminal governments? We shall see.

The capitalist leaders of the West and their puppets globally, and in Zambia, are moral invalids, intellectual midgets and political hypocrites! Hichilema and his UPND are extremists, anarchists, corrupt, criminals, pathological liars, and they practice lawlessness with reckless abandon, as O’Brien Kaaba has so eloquently elaborated, in his latest writing on corruption and criminality in Hakainde Hichilema’s government.



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