Our political cults, chaos and corruption make for a hungry and very poor country- Azwell Banda

Our political cults, chaos and corruption make for a hungry and very poor country

By Azwell Banda(The Mast)

Our capitalist rulers of the world are killing young and old people, women and children in Russia, Ukraine, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Myanmar, Bangladesh, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Mozambique, Sudan, Libya, Kenya, Mali, Niger, Central African Republic, parts of Nigeria and in many other parts of the world.

In all these wars capitalist greed for profits is at the heart of the violent conflicts. In virtually all these wars, it is impossible to miss the now hidden and now open hand of the US and its Western allies. The governments and their oligarchs of the US and its Western NATO allies, now also joined by Australia, Japan and the Philippines are prepared for war with Russia, North Korea, Iran, and eventually China – India is precariously sitting on the fence – it continues to have border skirmishes with China and economic rivalries with both the US and its Western allies and China: India has become a superpower as it has simultaneously become the world’s most populous nation. At the heart of all the superpowers’ manoeuvres lies capitalist greed for profits now hell bent on causing a redivision of the world, among themselves, even if a nuclear world war may be inevitable.

The world capitalist economy had barely recovered from the tremors of the 2007/8 global financial crisis when the coronavirus pandemic exploded on the world, further sending into turmoil an already crisis ridden world capitalist economy. Falling rates of profits, global disruption of value chains, rising inflation, rising unemployment rates, high cost of living, social chaos including the rise of extreme right-wing politics and fascism and their inevitable racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrants, homophobic and similar social malaise have exploded in the US, UK, Germany, France, Italy, and most of Europe, Israel, Argentine, Ukraine, Russia, India, Asia and just about in all capitalist countries of the world, including in Africa itself.

Well-meaning, progressive people all over the world including in the heartlands of the explosions of right-wing politics and fascism such as the US, UK, EU, Israel and India mass protests involving anti-fascist, anti-war and pro-peace movements have erupted involving hundreds of thousands of people. The Israeli genocide in Gaza has once again galvanised a world movement for peace and against war. US university student mass protests against the Israeli genocide in Gaza have spread to the UK, Germany, France, Italy and other universities world-wide. The Palestinian cause for freedom, decolonisation and statehood has once again ignited the global movement against colonialism, capitalism and imperialism.

The world capitalist and imperialist system has no solutions to the economic and world crises it generates. It has no solutions to the crises of falling rates of profits, inflation, overproduction, underconsumption, unemployment and underemployment, the contradiction between the global explosion of advanced new forces of production existing side by side with prefeudal and feudal forces of production, global warming, climate change, ecological disasters, human caused epidemics and pandemics and the many social crises all these cause to the world’s peoples. Private ownership of the means of production as the main driver of profit accumulation long expired when trusts, oligopolies and monopolies kicked out the individual capitalist as the driver of the capitalist system, and led to imperialism, the parasitic and thoroughly decayed, war-mongering terminal version of capitalism. The nation state has become an obstacle, obsolete, to the development of both capitalism and the advancement of the world human population. Instead, the nation state is now the facilitator of the growth of the world’s war economy.

It is in this extremely troubled and dangerous world on the verge of the nuclear Third World War that Zambia, a neo-colonial contraption with a collapsed formal economy, over indebted, extremely weak state institutions, collapsed national building project now replaced by open tribalism, provincialism and regionalism as hunger, diseases, unemployment and extreme political, economic, and social inequalities explode is perilously toying with its elite politics of cults, massive government corruption as social chaos grows throughout the country.

Clearly inherited from colonialism and our “freedom fighters” especially Kenneth Kaunda, our elites and their politicians have perfected the political practice of manufacturing cults for presidents of their type of political parties and thus, the president of Zambia. Our Constitution gives so much executive power and authority to the president that our racist British colonisers would have the governors they deployed in Zambia refuse some of the executive powers and authority. For example, without parliament approval and accountability, the president of Zambia can cause to be removed from the courts matters of ownership involving large mines partly owned by ZCCM-IH and settled secretly, by offloading such mines to foreign capitalists.

The president of Zambia can secretly authorise the parcelling out to foreign interests large tracts of Zambian land, completely ignoring the need for public hearings and by-passing parliament, and the country would do nothing about this. The president of Zambia today decides who must be investigated, arrested and prosecuted by the law enforcement agents, especially among our political elites. He or she can weaken and cripple the opposition by, among other things, cutting the opposition and its supporters from government business, sowing divisions in the opposition by funding chaos in them, using the police, courts, prison and parliament to sort out the opposition, and without any protests in the country, openly violate the Constitution of Zambia by literally suspending constitutionally guaranteed political rights.

All this abuse of presidential power and authority is done in order that the president and his close friends accumulate massive wealth as they auction the country to foreign money. Corruption is the main means by which wealth is amassed, by our elites and their politicians. For this economic and political scheme of looting and plundering Zambia to succeed, “the president” must be transformed into a cult figure, a demigod. The transformation starts in the political party when in opposition. It must be understood that the need for a cult for a president arises also because all our political elites also either already are rich, or aspire to be rich; to join the looting and plundering class colonialism bequeathed to Zambia.

Our elites and their politicians are inheritors of the British colonial political system and its authoritarian, thoroughly undemocratic, lying, hypocritical one-man cultist culture and highly contemptuous of the average native who, at best is regarded as a child even when fully grown as an adult, or a moron and retard well beneath the “educated native” now in charge of government. They are thoroughly suspicious, untrusting, paranoid and extremely secretive in their political behaviour.

The leader of the political party owns it as a personal vehicle to contest for personal political power, for personal aggrandisement. Such a leader is happy to be surrounded by ingratiating, fawning absolutely “loyal” acolytes: descent of any kind is regarded as a sign of disloyalty and an “attack” on the leader. This is to be expected: the leader after all owns the political party. There is hardly any internal democracy and accountability in all our political parties. When in government, it is not surprising that the leader of a political party in power behaves as if they own Zambia.

We are living in the last days of the period of intra-class political competition for political power among our neo-colonial, pro-imperialist elites and their political parasites. The broad masses of Zambia, the employed and unemployed working class and their rural relatives are yet to enter upon the stage of history to claim their right to economic and political power: this explains why these are today extremely hungry, largely without work, very poor and suffer horrible economic, social and political inequalities. To our elites and their political parasites, these Zambian masses are useful only for votes after every five years. For example, those in the opposition have already actually started to practice how they will preach to the Zambian masses, should they win the 2026 elections “to wait for 2031, to vote for any party of their choice”!

Our inherited colonial economic and political system and its elites (sadly including the majority of the so-called intellectuals, academics and professionals) and political parasites have no solutions to our national problems. Not being anti-capitalist and therefore not anti-imperialist, our elites cannot be nationalists, actually. The solutions to our problems can only be found when power – economic and political – will shift from our elites and their political parasites to the majority of the people of Zambia who are young, largely unemployed and their poor rural relatives.

As an economic and political class, the cult politics, corruption and social chaos our elites and their economic parasites have unleashed on Zambia cannot be resolved by them: true Zambian politics and economic freedom will only begin when the broad Zambian masses start to reclaim their economic and political power from these elites and their parasites. Then, and only then, can Zambia embark on its road for genuine justice, equality, national healing, peace, freedom, democracy, development, prosperity, true love and therefore happiness.

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