Post 2021 FIC reports: could Hichilema and his friends be looting Zambia and stashing their loot abroad?- Azwell Banda

Post 2021 FIC reports: could Hichilema and his friends be looting Zambia and stashing their loot abroad?

By Azwell Banda,

I am absolutely clear in my mind that Hichilema and his inner circle in the UPND and its corrupt government know they are headed for long jail terms, all of them, as soon as Zambians remove them from government.

To this end, Hichilema and his friends must kill the Patriotic Front, weaken all their opposition, take over the Electoral Commission of Zambia, rig all elections, take over the police, vandalise the executive, judiciary, parliament and all law enforcement agencies including the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) and the Drug Enforcement Commission (DEC), ban political rallies and all kinds of public protests in order to entrench themselves in power for a long time – more than the announced 50 years – thereby prevent going to jail for long terms.

Is it possible that the massive increases in large volume high value illicit cash transactions, especially corruption and externalisation of money, are Plan B strategies by the corrupt and criminal UPND government officials and politicians in their preparations for fleeing Zambia and living abroad, as soon as the tables will turn and their day to account for their period in government will come? It is impossible to escape this suspicion when one considers how Hichilema and his entire government have treated the FIC reports: it is as if the sums involved are peanuts and the FIC itself is just an irritant. Mutale Nalumango, UPND vice-president, has gone as far as offering some weird explanation linking the vast sums involved in suspected illicit financial transactions to inflation!

Hakainde Hichilema is the first president in the whole world to fire a board of a corruption fighting state agency because a member of the board has exposed the link between Hichilema’s State Chambers and massive corruption in government and the failure of Hichilema’s appointed manager of the corruption fighting agency to deal with corruption in his government. It is unheard of, for any politician in government, to so callously sully the personal reputations of men and women he appoints in strategic government positions because such men and women have alerted such a politician to the corruption going on in his government, under his very nose.

Hakainde Hichilema has decided to insult the Musa Mwenye led ACC board by simply dissolving it, not even through direct communication from Hichilema himself, but through one of his private staff at State House. All those in government high offices who were wrestling with their consciences whether to blow the whistle publicly on corruption they know about have been warned by Hichilema: do it and I will show you the door! I am eager to see which fool will step into the shoes left at the ACC by Musa Mwenye. It is a first, this act of extreme arrogance and contempt for Zambians exhibited by Hichilema: he has dissolved the ACC board but has kept in office Solicitor General Marshal Muchende whom O’Brien Kaaba has fingered for corruption.

With the ACC Mwenye led board and director general Tom Shamakamba forced out of office, it is hard to see how the investigations of corruption involving key government officials such as Solicitor General Marshal Muchende and several Cabinet ministers can be conducted legitimately. We have since seen some reshuffles social media has likened to transferring bulk faecal matter from one faecal vacuum truck to another. Never before has the collective Zambian intelligence, wisdom and anger at government corruption been insulted in this manner, by any Zambian president or government: Hichilema has scored a historic first. It is only in Zambia where 61 containers of urgently needed medical supplies can apparently “disappear” only to “re-appear” after more than half a year, without the relevant government ministry and all responsible state officials raising the alarm and doing anything about it. And Silvia Masebo, former minister of health keeps her ministerial pay and full ministerial package, as she is merely shunted to another scandal and corruption prone ministry – the Ministry of Lands.

In our 60-year history of independence, Zambia has never had such a criminal and corrupt outfit disguising itself as a political party, such as the UPND. The UPND is the first political party in Zambia to arrogantly violate the Constitution, openly promote criminality in government, shamelessly defend and shield corrupt government officials and politicians from arrest and prosecution, and just under three years in government, weaken and make absolutely useless all our law enforcement agencies including the DEC, ACC and the police in crimes committed by the rich, politically connected and politicians in government. We clearly have different methods of applying the same Zambian laws for rich, politically connected persons and politicians in government, and the rest of Zambian society.

And yet Hakainde and the UPND conned Zambians so well by pretending to be bearers of solutions to the high cost of living and doing business, an economy in crisis, champions of our Constitution, defenders of our democracy, and promoters of human rights and all our political freedoms. They all pretended to hate corruption. It is hard to believe the radical metamorphosis from political angels to criminal, very corrupt and pathological liars Hichilema and his friends have undergone barely three years in office. No political party in the history of Zambia has lied and turned their back on their lies, and now clearly fake fight against corruption, as shamelessly as Hakainde Hichilema and all the members of his inner circle of power in the UPND, including their vice-president Mutale Nalumango.

It is a most shocking study in grotesque political immorality, corruption and criminality to compare and contrast the behaviour and utterances of Hichilema and the UPND in opposition, and now in government. No night has been darker than any day!

A word about Vice-President Mutale Nalumango Nalumango’s efforts to defend her thoroughly corrupt and criminal political party are exposing a very worrying streak in her political character: she too is after all a shameless liar capable of cooking up fantastic nonsensical defences such as inflation is to blame for the huge amounts of money involved in suspected illicit transactions flagged by the FIC reports for the period the UPND has been in government. Increasingly, the moral, intellectual and rational quality of her defences for her party are falling well below the insane utterances of agriculture minister Mtolo Phiri. She has denied that her government has ever exported maize. Her Minister of Finance is on record confirming that it did export maize. We all know the UPND government released maize for exports from our reserve storage, and even subsidised these maize exports, by removing government duty from maize exports.

As Vice-President, Mutale Nalumango must be well aware of the corruption and massive criminality going on in her government. She has neither protested nor resigned. Instead, she has become a very willing accomplice by offering very strange, and frankly, many times quite insane sounding defences. She too is a criminal suspect. She too must start intensive training about how to spend time in jail, for a long, long time too.

Our criminality and corruption in government is a manifestation of how our parasitic capitalists and their politicians and support choirs mercilessly exploit the Zambian working class and poor rural populations. All such parasitic Zambian elites fight to be in government in order to have their opportunity to siphon off resources meant for public welfare, thus exacerbating class inequalities and deepening poverty in Zambia. Zambians now know why the majority of us are poor: our politicians fight to get into government to become rich at the expense of national development.

Corruption facilitates the accumulation of capital by a few at the expense of the many in Zambia. It is for this reason that all our politicians when in government try to accumulate capital and wealth as fast as they can, before they are booted out of power and another equally corrupt bunch is elected. This is how our so called “capitalist class” or “private sector” is formed and reproduces itself. All the while, all our politicians are prone to collect bribes, commissions and rents from foreigners as they auction our natural resources to them. This explains why it is impossible to cause such criminals in government to reveal how they make their money. It also explains why Hichilema can never publish regularly his assets, liabilities, businesses, income and his business dealings with the government.

For 60 years in October this year, we will have been reproducing this king of corruption and criminality in government. It is this which has created a Zambia with the majority of its people struggling to eat, while a tiny minority is dying from diseases of the rich, including obesity. The majority of Zambians have become accustomed to simply changing one set of corrupt and criminal politicians in government, for another. We will never defeat our hunger, unemployment, poverty, and all kinds of inequities this way. Political and economic power must be wrestled from our corrupt and criminal economic and political elites, and their intellectual, academic, social and cultural parasites and transferred into the hands of the majority of Zambians, who are by and by the working class and poor rural populations. Only then, can Zambia break the cycles of corruption, criminality, hunger and poverty which keep her backward.

Send comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com