Hichilema’s Cabinet is the worst in Zambia’s history: it is now possibly committing economic genocide – Pt 3
By Azwell Banda,
Last week on Friday, on this column, in Part 2 of this series of my articles on the “dream cabinet” of Hakainde Hichilema and the social and economic genocide they are collectively inflicting on the majority of Zambians, I said that Zambians are being bullied to suffer silently by the UPND government because if you complain, you are accused of being just lazy, lover of free things, uncontrollable breeder, lacking in entrepreneurial skills, you do not invest, are ignorant and need knowledge and wisdom presumably from Hichilema, and have a wrong mindset, among the many inferior human attributes you suffer from.
It is absolutely important to fight back, with everything we have got, those of us who desire a free, democratic, equal, fair and prosperous Zambia grounded in the rule of a genuine independent Zambian Constitution and Zambian laws, against this bullying, this savage attempt to silence all criticism of a man-god the UPND has fashioned for itself, in Hakainde Hichilema. Should we lose this fight, Zambia will be well on its way to becoming a full-blown dictatorship, a right-wing, extremely conservative and quite fascist state. The key signs of the approaching dictatorship are all there for all to see: violation of the Zambian Constitution and laws with impunity, by the UPND government, restriction of public political activities of opposition parties, the political and executive abuse of state law enforcement organs, the abuse of the judiciary and parliament, the interference by the government in the internal workings of the largest opposition parliamentary party, the marriage between large foreign businesses with the UPND government, Western diplomatic cover for the undemocratic and criminal conduct of the UPND government and so on.
What I did not say last Friday is that it has also become fashionable for the UPND government and its praise singers to accuse anyone who criticises Hakainde Hichilema, their man-god, of hatred of Hichilema. This blanket charge is more forcefully levelled at Patriotic Front (PF) leaders, members and sympathisers, and I have noticed, also at most people who either have names not prevalent in the “strongholds” of the UPND, such as mine, or are consistent critiques of undemocratic, unconstitutional and criminal conduct in government, such as Sishuwa Sishuwa. Usually, no serious effort is made to deal with the content, the substance of the criticism, rather, the person offering the criticism is abused and savaged so as to bully them into silence. Cyber bullying is freely tolerated by the UPND government when it is in its defence.
This primitive, unsophisticated and extremely backward treatment of individuals expressing themselves critically about the UPND and its man-god, Hichilema, extends to well meaning, knowledgeable, educated and very experienced professionals, politicians and supporters of the UPND, who are honest enough to accept when wrong things are done by Hichilema and the UPND. This bullying is therefore also inside the UPND itself, logically.
I too, have been falsely given PF membership (I suppose because I am “Banda”, I am therefore for Edgar Chagwa Lungu and the PF) and I have been accused of hating Hakainde Hichilema. And yet I have never been a member of the PF, and in fact when Hakainde Hichilema was foolishly and illegally detained by Edgar Chagwa Lungu’s PF government, I, together with others, even as I knew and understood that my morals, philosophy, ideology and politics are diametrically opposed to Hichilema and his UPND, organised international trade union and democratic solidarity events for Hichilema including protests at the Zambian missions such as the South African High Commission offices in Pretoria, in South Africa. Some PF members actually threatened my life, and called for me to be arrested, extradited and tried for treason in Zambia. I treated these threats with the absolute contempt they deserved. I have no personal reasons to hate Hichilema either. Politically, I despise him for the gross injustices and suffering his misrule of Zambia has unleashed on the majority of the people of Zambia.
The UPND has evolved a “professional savage media army” specifically for the purpose of defending their man-god and attacking, viciously and ruthlessly, his critics, no matter how legitimate, rational and patriotic such criticism can be: they insult, abuse and hound anyone who criticises Hichilema and his UPND political choir. This “professional savage media army” of the UPND has its perfect complement in the ingratiating, fawning, cowering, for ever on the “automatic defence mode” of the entire Cabinet of Hichilema. Note how UPND Minister of Youth, Sport and Arts Elvis Nkandu automatically, almost unconsciously, has declared Hichilema was not booed last Sunday at Heroes Stadium in Lusaka. UPND national youth chairperson Gilbert Liswaniso doubts that Hichilema was booed, but, unlike Nkandu, cleverly declares that booing is part of politics. Here we see that the UPND man-god, Hichilema, cannot be booed by Zambians today, even as the UPND itself has conceded that life has become tougher in Zambia, economically, than it was under the PF government.
Hakainde is neither deaf nor blind. Hichilema surely must have at least a very few honest, professional trusted intelligence officers: they heard the booing and saw the ugly gestures. He heard the booing in the stadium. He saw the ugly signs some Zambians were making at him, both outside and inside the stadium. Instead of letting Zambians waste time on the silly and mundane discussion of whether booing did or did not occur, Hichilema, if he was a true democrat and not a liar who lives in a fake bubble constructed by his political choir and praise singers, which false bubble is very important for his foreign backers, would put to bed this wasting time and publicly accept that he appreciated Zambians’ anger at the growing hunger and poverty in the country, and that yes, he was booed and nasty gestures were made at him. And then he would proceed to defend and argue the case for the measures his government has mooted is are putting in place to put out the rising fires in Zambia. This will not happen.
The UPND man-god, Hakainde, worshiped by the UPND, lives in his own world, and he must be shielded and protected from the real world. Like all false gods, he is simultaneously psychologically and emotionally very fragile and yet dangerously powerful. The fake bubble he lives in must be defended by his UPND political choir, by himself and his foreign backers such as our infamous British High Commissioner Nicholas Woolly. This fake bubble, the illusion, is absolutely crucial to sustaining his leadership of the UPND, his presidency of Zambia, and his relationship with his foreign backers. It must never be punctured, and be admitted by the UPND, that the majority of Zambians are angry with the UPND and its man-god, Hichilema, and would rather see him removed from government, now, not tomorrow, because of the cruel, torturous hunger and poverty he has unleashed upon them.
There is nothing new about all this. This is how all oppressive, domineering, suppressive, exploitative, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes such as are all capitalist and imperialist states and governments, sustain themselves: they thrive on packaging and selling fake, thoroughly false and perfectly irrational public “narratives” and “alternatives to reality”. In Zambia today the dominant false “narrative” must be that “Zambians love Hichilema”, and “HH is love”. And that all the problems Zambians suffer now are caused by the PF. Blame it on Lungu, as Minister of Local Government Gary Nkombo moronically said about the cholera epidemic.
Correctly, last Friday on this column I said every king or false idol must have their own enablers, intellectuals, academics, choirs and other cultural workers whose job it is to defend, manufacture consent among the masses, and sing praises for the king or false idol. There are many ways, some small and easy to understand, such as just keeping quiet when the powerful and the worshiped savage the poor and the weak, violate constitutions and laws, shrink democratic space, collapse a national economy, advance the recolonisation of a country, profit criminally, all the while unleashing Tsunamis of hunger, unemployment, poverty and extreme social, economic, cultural, religious, tribal, regional and political inequalities.
It pays to be quiet, and better still, to join the bandwagon of the evil rulers. The risks are too high for speaking out, for protesting and criticising the false kings and earthly evil rulers: punishments and banishment from the kingdom await those who speak out, or publicly protest. In our circumstances of extreme hunger, unemployment, poverty and tribalism, we see that for most of our educated, professional, experienced and generally well-meaning Zambians, it is better to eat with the dictator of the day, especially if they are of your tribe or region than to objectively, courageously, consistently point out the wrongs and injustices committed by all our evil rulers. This way, our educated, professional, experienced and generally well-meaning Zambians make their contemptable contributions to sustaining and feeding tribalism and prolonging in office, our evil rulers.
Individuals who only yesterday were penning long legal arguments attacking unconstitutional, criminal and undemocratic conduct by government, now are quiet, silent, or writing strange articles far removed from the real concerns of their country, now, whose majority are suffering social and economic genocide, under the supervision and leadership of their man-god. When they choose to write about the evil goings on in Zambia, it is to deflect blame away from the man-god, and unleash an attack on individuals and offices they perhaps secretly covet. Others sustain their public personas by occasionally actually pointing out the most obvious bad things happening in the country, but only to also shield the man-god from blame, and to blame the PF governments, nature, climate and all manner of eclectic possible fake causes, inevitably ending up calling upon God Almighty to rescue us. Meanwhile, they hold steadfast to their cognitive dissonance sickness, prejudices and moral cowardice they suffer from, by proclaiming and insisting that the man-god is actually doing a good job, and, currently, “we have no alternative”, to the man-god.
We thus end up with the weird situation where some sections of our Christian community condemn the Speaker of our National Assembly for her undemocratic and unconstitutional behaviour while other Christian communities encourage her to hold fast and stay the course; she is doing a good job, they say. We have the strange aberration of a civil society organisation meant to defend, uplift and advance the interests of women selecting which women are fit for its attention and defence, and which are not. Previously vocal university staff, lecturers and researchers and their unions suddenly go quiet, almost as if they are underground. University students and their unions are deathly quiet, as the country is being primed to explode because of hunger, unemployment and poverty. All these are clear signs of a country in the vicious grip of a man-god, and what all this entails. But “the people” are growing restless every day, and angry, as their hunger and poverty explode.
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