The emergency of an extreme right-wing, proto fascist government in Zambia, 58 years after independence
By Azwell Banda
Hakainde Hichilema (HH) and the UPND have the backing of large foreign mining finance.
They have won over a significant section of our educated and middle classes who want an end to cadreism, political violence and their version of “economic growth” in which profitability can be returned to their global parasitic economic activities and enterprises. This project cannot succeed unless significant sections of the faith and religious organisations, traditional leaders, trade unions, the courts, the police, army, intelligence, state crime fighting organisations, the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) and a loyal violent youthful following are mobilised behind the cult like figure of HH. At this point, we shall have a proto fascist movement in the making, against the masses of Zambia, who are the majority rural poor and urban unemployed. Then the full true colours of HH and the UPND will shine very bright and clear!
UPND politicians in government, led by Hakainde Hichilema and his right-handyman Situmbeko Musokotwane, do not tire explaining away their obvious inability to urgently attack and drastically reduce the mass hunger, malnutrition, poverty, unemployment and grotesque inequalities the majority of Zambians are suffering from, by using classic right-wing economics textbook theories. They are at pains to drum it into our heads that our national problems and acute crises are because we are not exactly a free market: too many Zambians have grown accustomed to “government handouts”, the “private sector” is the “engine of economic growth” and main source of job creation, the country needs “private investments” for growth to happen, and only then as a result of “economic growth” can unemployment, poverty and lack of development be resolved.
HH has said several times you cannot attend to poverty unless the private sector invests, economic growth takes place, and then many jobs are created. The poor, you see, must wait for private foreign and local “investors” to “invest” first and therefore create jobs, only then can poverty be alleviated, and hopefully, eradicated too. And so HH has designated himself Zambia’s number one salesman, to attract “investments” into Zambia. To attract these “investments” Zambia needs to have “all its macro-economic fundamentals right” such as low inflation rate, stable exchange rate, sustainable debt, favourable tax and economic policies for “investors”, drastically reduced government intervention in the economy and so on.
We are told that there will be so many US dollars flooding Zambia after the country fully embarks upon the IMF “debt sustainability” but loss-of-economic-and-financial-sovereignty programme that we will not know what to do with the US dollars. The challenge is to be patient and wait for HH and his friends in government to “methodically” plough through these things.
On a one sided myopic ideological plane, the extreme right-wing ideology of the UPND and their archaic formulas sound and appear “rational”, “reasonable” and “good”. Repeated so many times they actually constitute powerful and persuasive propaganda, for a government of rich individuals, by the rich individuals, and of rich individuals!
At the heart of this pathetic assembly of unscientific and unproven theories and propaganda for the rich is a cold and heartless assumption of the rule of “survival of the fittest” in the capitalist markets, and the false assumption that the individual must fend for herself or himself, and therefore the poor are morally responsible for their poverty. Taken together, these false beliefs are a philosophy, an ideology, a moral system and a fatalistic view of life: those who are not chosen, no matter what one can do, will always be poor and destined to serve the rich, and the rich are chosen by God to be rich and to lead. It is a belief in absolute inequality.
We have heard it said that Zambians are lazy, they are unable to “grab economic opportunities”, they “love handouts”, and so on. Our education system is attacked for producing “job seekers” rather than “entrepreneurs”. A good example is made about the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) and how this money is lying idle while millions of Zambians languish in grinding poverty. Others have gone so far as to insult Zambia’s history of “socialism” for our national poverty and underdevelopment. And yet there is a perfect history to how and why Zambia has now landed itself with HH and the UPND – openly and unashamedly extreme right-wing, neo-liberal, pro-colonial parasites of global capitalism.
These extreme UPND right-wing liberal ideas and beliefs, at whose centre is the false assumption of the supremacy of “freedom of the individual” are a product of the struggles of men who became rich through wars, slavery, capturing other people’s lands and resources, colonialism, commerce and trade in goods usually resulting from wars, slavery and colonialism, as they fought kings and their loyal families who, even as these men became fabulously rich, still held and controlled political power. These rich men organised themselves and overthrew kings and their monarchies. Some kings were actually killed. Clever kings, like the British monarchy, struck deals with these rich men, to co-govern with them.
What we call the “state” and “government” today were actually created by these rich men to protect, secure and grow their wealth, free from the interference of kings and their loyal families and friends. The pursuit and protection of private property and wealth is at the heart of what today we call “the state” and “government”. Wars, slavery, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, apartheid – all were and are even today, weapons used by these rich people to exclude the majority of human beings from their vicious, ruthless and deadly competition to become rich, and to justify their false claims to “superiority”.
What today is “Zambia” has a rich history of wars, slavery, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and apartheid. The British colonialists made sure they damaged our collective African minds by regarding and treating us as inferior human beings to white people. This way, they limited competition for acquiring wealth among themselves only. They stunted our ability to think, numbed and suppressed our talents, and prepared us only for inferior roles in human society. To achieve this required us to be immersed in untold material and cultural poverty.
Our struggle for “independence” and “freedom” therefore was a struggle against wars, slavery, racism, colonialism, patriarchy, capitalism and apartheid – the things which our colonisers used to dominate, suppress, oppress, dispossess and exploit us; thereby reducing us into a mass of impoverished people.
Our “freedom fighters” by adopting unquestioningly systems of the “state” and “government” and “politics” of our colonisers actually made a pact with the devil: they failed to secure our economic freedom and therefore succumbed to the power and attraction of the systems of rule our colonial masters used to reduce us into an exploited impoverished mass of humanity, thereby condemning us to the kind of material and cultural poverty which today, 58 years after 1964, has landed us with an openly arrogant, colonialism admiring government in HH and the UPND. This is the historical explanation for the birth, existence and rule of the UPND and HH, in Zambia.
If you listen very carefully to how the UPND view the average Zambian, you will not fail to hear in what they say echoes of how racist, colonial white people view Africans in general, and Zambians in particular – how the colonialist regarded the colonial native: happy in their poverty, stupid, dull and lazy. They are the smart, methodical ones. Take for example the disaster in the rural agricultural sector the UPND is brewing, two consecutive farming seasons now. Arrogantly, coldly, without any pity or sympathy, they have decreed anyone who has been on FISP for three consecutive seasons is out, this time around, regardless of whether such an individual has not graduated to a level where they can support themselves. Only our colonial masters were this heartless – the poverty of the native was none of their business.
Now, 55 per cent of Zambians still survive on rural agriculture – it is the economic, social and cultural activity around which all their lives depend on and evolve. The UPND says even if this farming season is a failure, Zambia has enough food in reserve to make sure there is no hunger in the next season. There is hunger already today. More than 1.3 million Zambians are desperate for food, in our rural areas, and cannot find it. The IMF itself, in their UPND agreement, concede that Zambia is among the most malnourished countries of the world. Only an African who sees other Africans as colonial natives can ignore the fact that Zambia is a hungry, malnourished poor country, today, not tomorrow. They have reduced FISP and have instead lined up to make money themselves from supplying agricultural inputs, rather than guaranteeing quality all-inclusive farming input support to rural agriculture. They are in fact heading blindly to their demise. Food is a primary national security issue. Rural farmers are the backbone of maize production.
Over a year in government now, the UPND are “methodically” and “patiently” “working” through the crises of copper mining on the Copperbelt. The immense poverty and social chaos on the Copperbelt are not enough to move them to urgently resolve the question of copper mining on the Copperbelt – obviously they are looking to create lucrative arrangements for themselves first, whatever arrangements they will make.
The Copperbelt has a special place in the history, economy, politics and national culture of Zambia. It is an unstable Zambian government that does not have some strategic control over the Copperbelt. It is this which also accounts for the methods used to steal the Kabushi and Kwacha constituencies, by the UPND. Here we see how the UPND, our educated class, most of our civil society, business, our “governance” activists, sections of the media and US and EU diplomats have all quickly fallen in line behind the UPND. They have offered none, silent and mild protest, or actually outright rebuke of the PF for not fielding “better candidates”, instead of condemning the UPND for violating the Zambian Constitution and the so-called “rule of law” – thereby ushering Zambia into the dark world of undemocratic, extreme right-wing politics and proto fascism. Welcome to the new dawn Zambia!
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