By Sara Imutowana Yeta II
RE-SHAPING INTO ONE ZAMBIA ONE NATION
Our beautiful country is divided into ten provinces as the highest administrative structure.
These provinces are Central, Copperbelt, Eastern, Luapula, Lusaka, Muchinga, North-Western, Northern, Southern and Western.
All the ten regions have two or more Ministers in the new Cabinet of 24 men and women.
This, is one of the sure ways of facilitating and promoting equality of opportunity, good relations, harmony and peaceful coexistence between our people of different ethnic and regional backgrounds.
The composition of the Cabinet makes it easy for mutual solidarity that had evaded us, under Lungu’s regime, to find expression among individuals, ethnic groupings and regions.
We earnestly pray that this is the beginning of a genuine and lifelong national cohesion project where the inequalities, exclusions and disparities based on ethnicity or regionalism or any other distinctions which for ten years have been engendering divisions, distrust, hatred and dehumanisation among ethnic groupings and regions will be reduced and/or eliminated in an intentional and sustained manner.
How does Lungu and the Patriotic Front (PF) feel to see President Hakainde Hichilema put together a regionally representative Cabinet with a national character from his maiden Cabinet appointments which the previous regime failed to do so in the past ten years for not looking at the bigger picture?
We may not see the benefits of an inclusive Cabinet right away, but the gesture will go a long way in bringing about nation-building where our country with diverse ethnic groupings and regions will come together within the boundaries of our sovereign State with a unified constitutional dispensation, an integrated national economy, shared values, as equals, to work towards eradicating the divisions and injustices of the previous regime; to foster unity; and promote a countrywide conscious sense of being proudly Zambians, committed to our country as “one people.”
So, it is possible to have a Cabinet with a national character?
The ethnic and regional divisions engineered by the previous regime had gone too far to envisage a Cabinet made up of people from all ten regions.
I am not censuring the previous regime and those aspiring for national leadership, but we hope we can all learn from President Hichilema’s government to never again perpetuate hierarchies based on pre-given or ethnically or regionally engineered and imposed divisions of our people rooted in prejudice, discrimination and exclusion.
The new Cabinet is also a call to us all to rethink, in Zambian terms, of what ethnic and regional cohesion, linked to nationbuilding, should be.
This Cabinet, no doubt and in essence, should be directed towards the practical actualisation of national unity and democracy in Zambia, and guard both jealously.
Thank you President Hichilema for once again, in a long time, for making us all feel part of this country and for setting the process of moving towards a stable and predictable environment where we can all freely and unprejudiced compete, or pursue our life-long aspirations and endeavours.
I am a proud Zambian feeling lucky to be part of this historic moment of re-shaping our country into one Zambia one nation.