Pamela Bwembya

TAKING NO PRISONERS

I know we can’t all be smart enough to tell the difference between dunderheads and people of sense. Three months ago, on the 12th of August , we had what most of us considered an important choice to make. Believe it or not, about 1.8 million Zambians and foreigners were motivated enough to keep the Patriotic Front in power.

To these citizens and citizens of neighboring countries, Edgar Lungu and his team dressed, walked, danced, and talked well enough to be the principle decision makers for our beautiful but inexplicably broke country. To them, the degazetting of national forests, outright theft of public resources through purchases of stale drugs, and at times, purchase of thin air by those that were selfish enough to widen the gap between genuine hard workers and born-thieves was very normal. After all, “when one steals he steals for himself for the future.”

Such was the accepted leadership. The comfort of the country’s top spender was a justified pursuit. He didn’t just deserve the best suits, and suits, and suits, but the sleekest toy in our rain-hungry skies.

Can the intelligent dunderheads among us sit up and tell us where we would have been by now had these people retained power?

Of course we all love those that keep their word. When the late FTJ Chiluba (MHSRIP) said “Kanshi ba tata ba Kaunda niba puti” meaning KK was a liar (may KK’s soul rest in peace too), wasn’t it in reference to a promise that an egg would be an ever present accompaniment on every breakfast table?

Of course we may seem to be a gullible lot, but there is a big difference between a liar that does everything to sink us deeper into poverty and one whose every effort points towards striving to improve our lives. HH’s moves seem to promise painful things howbeit meant to move us out of our bottled pain. Aren’t gambits normal in strategic games?

It is painful for me to watch Hakainde Hichilema break the mould by travelling on commercial planes to save us that extra Kwacha to improve our chances of a stronger Kwacha some day. Some among us will say the Kwacha improved towards the last elections on the back of an executive whose leadership was beginning to tick; but what makes you fail to see that leaders with millions stashed in their concubines’ dubiously acquired homes had some capacity to paint the foreign exchange landscape a color of their choice? Wasn’t K2 million just pocket change?

Our country had been turned into a country where the name of one of your eight great grandparents from your paternal-paternal-paternal line determined your chances of either a government job or a government contract. Valentine’s Day had been turned into a fear-filled day for fear of being mistaken for a UPND supporter.

People open your eyes and appreciate what we now have! We are all participants in the journey to recovery. HH need not be the only one willing to sacrifice his comfort for a better Zambia.

It is amazing to see intelligent friends like Malama Katulwende Author, Kasebamashila Kaseba and the very intelligent PEP president Sean Tembo attempt to throw our baby with the obviously dirty political bath water. Do these good friends know where we would have been had ECL maintained his coveted seat?

By now, only those with feacal matter colored tongues would have been allowed to pollute the airwaves. No one with a red tongue would have been allowed to speak. By this time, promises to lock up HH for good would have been kept just to satisfy our appetite for kept promises.

Isn’t it a blessing that we can all freely wear PF regalia with no consequences? Isn’t it nice that those whose only sin was to hail from wrong provinces have another chance to be citizens of Zambia? Isn’t it nice that some journalists and their stations can freely paint the president with brushes of their choice? What is so wrong about reminding our leaders that no one deserves an allowance for doing their job in their town of residence?

Every farmer knows that ploughing and planting is necessary for a potential harvest, but also knows that germination and eventual maturity are dependent on many other factors. The seed must suffer temporal rejection before it can sprout. Turning round our economy depends on the implementation of growth-oriented policies, and how citizens respond to those policies. Turning Zambia around is our collective responsibility.

The starting point is to fully understand and accept the $hit we are in. We need to pay fairly for what we consume before we can start accumulating enough reserves to wipe our debt and start registering real growth.

The only major failure I see in the New Dawn government is that of keeping their promise of respecting the civil rights of criminals among us. UPND is still working with the PF budget for crying out loud ba swaini!

A bit of free education for the laggards:

Accounting profit is the amount of money left after deducting explicit costs of running the business. Economic profit is the difference between revenue and both explicit and implicit costs after considering various possible business decisions and actions.

This is lesson is important because the smart among us have gone flat-out to demonize tough decisions whose ultimate aim is to maximize economic profits. I may not be the government’s beautiful spokesperson but I can see that we now have bold leaders who don’t want to stroke otherwise doomed egos.

The country stands in very deep debt; doing nothing and continuing to pretend that all is fine like the PF did for many years leading to the elections, will turn our country into a failed state where criminals will invade every sphere of our lives. If the superficial prices of electricity and fuel either go down or stay the way they are, just for our laziness-defined lives to thrive for a moment, our end will be disastrous.

Only a very dull person will fail to see that, as things are, crime is increasing. We now have stories of unsuspecting passengers being raped for seeking accepted services of moving from one place to another by minibus crews. The artificially maintained costs of fuel and electricity are part of what is making our people devise wrong ways of enjoying what they used to afford.

Can the smart ones among us refuse to accept that Zesco buys electricity at 11 cents per kilowatt only to sell it to us at 7 cents per kilowatt? Can they also agree with me that our country had no capacity to buy a single liter of petroleum when world prices of petroleum turned negative (meaning suppliers were offering to pay anyone willing to get their fuel) because of a hardcoded requirement of our INDENI and indebtedness?. Omicro is stealing on us, and this scene is about to be replayed again.

Can the smart ones argue decisively about reduced economic losses to be derived from bringing in finished products versus converting our lovely INDENI into an efficient plant that meets expectations.

Can the smart ones among us explain what the previous government did to warrant the stagnation of current prices of petroleum products and electricity in the midst of a deteriorating exchange rate and huge debts to fuel suppliers that resulted in the closure of INDENI for lack of feedstock.

I am with those that are providing checks and balances, but right now we are in debt. Our country will only get better after we start spending less than we produce. That is the universal principle of accumulation.

PB …. always in national interest.