I’ve been thinking about our politics and politicians.
It is a space so full of angst.
You can almost taste the persona
l pain, bile, acidity, hatred and vengefulness, that informs crucial decisions.es
It feels as though, across board, individuals are leading from a point of negativity.
That is a very dangerous situation.
Take President Hichilema.
Many times, when he speaks, you hear the man who, for years, was insulted and attacked for nothing more than his DNA. Something he could not change.
The attacks were vicious and unyielding and they – it seems to me, anyway – wounded his inner being.
Truth is that, if personal pain is the place he, knowingly or unknowingly, leads from, Zambia suffers.
The chances of taking paths he might not, if he was not acting from an internal ache, are very high.
Then the opposition.
If you close your eyes and listen to their individual and collective selves, everything appears informed by a combination of enemity with the sitting President and an all consuming desire for power.
A hunger, especially, for the good life high office brings.
Decisions and statements strike one as underpinned by teeth gritting disdain of a political opponent.
Then, there is the patent sense of entitlement to the “milk and honey” that comes with being the sitting boma.
Now, as leadership requires, the men and women, described above, are, everyday, sitting in rooms to make decisions that affect 20 million odd people.
The problem we are sitting with is that, if my quack psychological analysis is true, those decisions are, frequently, not being directed by the objective best interest of citizens.
You see, pain and enemity will most likely produce myopic, parochaial and harmful decision making.
All I am saying is that, just about all our current leaders come across as requiring urgent therapy.
For all our sakes.