M’membe; Chinese showed you HH is no puppet like ‘your’ Sata – Part 1
By Austin Mbozi
I invite Socialist Party President comrade Fred M’membe to debate with me over this topic with as much zeal/humoUr as he debated with Laura Miti. Since ‘King Fred’ M’membe responded that Laura’s attacks were too general and ‘scaremonger’, I hereby engage him with more specific data and ‘welcoming’ to him.
The best way to tame M’membe is not to social-media-insult him, ban his rallies or arrest him for ‘offences’ which we as UPND can embarrassingly fail to court-court. This only helps him win the support of anti-UPND social media and of PF thief-thug, as well as financial support of international anti-Western global community.
I am personally opposed to the undemocratic elements among these anti-Westerners. But I oppose using force against their views, unless they use military force against democratic peoples. The best approach is to invite M’membe to open media debates and allow his small rallies, only to counter them with massive rallies like those President HH did in Maamba and Copperbelt. After all, M’membe cannot beat UPND in 2026, and he is neither violent nor insults HH. Yes, he can be irritating with his international media rhetoric that President HH is a puppet. But he has the right to such speech. UPND supporters must read a lot as he does and out-debate him.
Here are signs that HH is not a Western puppet like M’membe’s enemy-turned friend Sata. First, the fact that the Chinese including President Xi Jinping signed serious business agreements means that they were disappointed that very little implementation was done after they invited Sata in April 2013. HH’s agreements include production in Zambia some 720 Mega Watts by China’s Longi Green Energy Technology company and bringing an additional four pumps to the Luanshya mine de-watering project.
HH is not Western puppet. How dare he is also allowing the Chinese to invest $1 billion into the Chinese-built 1,860 km TAZARA railway which US President Biden openly fears! Since the US can’t dare HH, its only option is by 2028 to counter-invest $1 billion into the Portuguese-built Lobito-Kolwezi railway to enable Western imports of minerals from Congo DR, Zambia and Angola. I admit that such agreements do occur daily among governments with no tangible results; like teenagers promising ‘love’ to various boys and girls in night clubs daily. What is reassuring is that this time around, President HH ordered commerce minister Chipoka Mulenga that these agreements must produce tangible results on the ground.
Now contrast HH with Sata who was real Taiwanese/American puppet. It was this same M’membe through his Post newspaper who told us that the then opposition leader Sata was a puppet ‘hired gun ‘ when Sata wrote-asked Taiwan to give him $50,000 to travel to America on a China-discrediting mission (The Post, 25 October 2007). Taiwan is a Chinese Island which practices Western liberal democracy and receives American military aid just because a Chinese puppet Chiang Kai-Shek fled there when the current ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) overthrew him in 1949. After a civil war resulted in no-victory for either side, the CCP currently recognises the Taiwanese government, but opposes its secession from China. Indeed, Sata showed signs of a real puppet. He did not understand any complex international political, philosophical and economic forces that divided Western and anti-Western camps. So he ended up de-campaigning anything petty against China; their ‘low quality’ goods, ‘low quality’ workforce and lying that a Chinese porter stole his passport. The CCP bosses watched him with contempt. To them he was just a hungry puppy barking at the elephant whom it cannot bite.
To fight President Rupiah Banda, M’membe switched to supporting the same ‘hired gun’ Sata. The moment Sata won, Beijing-based Chinese bosses sent their ambassador Zhou Yuxiao to eat ‘luncheon’ with him at State House with Chinese people in Zambia. Our elders say that a dignified man must organise food to the home of a poor opportunistic ‘muselela kwakaba’. This Chinese ‘luncheon’ was enough to persuade ‘muselela kwakaba’ Sata into converting to a Chinese puppet. Sata praised the Chinese as his ‘hardworking friends’ whom President Rupiah Banda failed to properly utilise… bla , bla , bla’…
The Chinese learnt puppet-fixing from how they fixed their own Western puppet, Chiang Kai-Shek. By 1700 AD, China grew towards superpower status under the Qing dynasty. But Chinese citizens, demanding poverty-reducing rulers, organised the Boxer Revolution in 1900. The dynasty tolerated foreign protection, but the Chinese overthrew it in 1911, and Chiang Kai-Shek’s KMT (Kuomintang) party took over. Modern China’s main builder Mao Zedong fought the KMT for ‘poor leadership’. In the resulting civil war, Japan invaded China in 1936. KMT relied on American protection, corrupt-wasting some $750 million as puppet of US President Truman. Still, Mao overthrew the puppet in 1949 after his 8,000 mile ‘Long March’ into the battlefield. This success with fighting puppets, explains why the West failed to fight communism from China despite their success in the Soviet Union/Russia. Today, China is the only country in the world that got some 365.1 million people out of poverty between 1987 and 2005 ( See philosopher Thomas Pogge’s book, ‘Politics As Usual: Behind the Pro-poor Rhetoric’, 2010, page 100). So when Chinese see a guy like HH, they know that he is not a cheap-minded character like M’membe’s Sata. Hence their host/respecting him… continued next Monday.
The author specialises in global economic ethics at the University of Zambia. Phone 0978-741920. Email:austin.mbozi@gmail.com