The UPND and PF type of politicians have consistently failed us: what is to be done?
By Azwell Banda
Last week Friday on this column, I said nothing best illustrates the total contempt and disrespect the UPND and PF leaders have for the majority of struggling Zambians than the illusion they both have that Zambia has no choice but to choose between these two thoroughly selfish, greedy, rotten, corrupt, thieving, lying, hypocritical same kind of government and foreign money parasitic post-independence Zambian politicians.
I emphatically concluded that they are both wrong; absolutely wrong. As expected, I have been wholesomely insulted by UPND and Hakainde Hichilema praise singers, now joined by a good sprinkling of PF supporters! I sincerely thank them both, for letting me know their feelings. However, I still await their considered critical thoughts of my article’s contents; otherwise I will diagnose them as pitiful patients of cognitive dissonance in need of urgent psychiatric medical help, and, from me, nothing but great sympathies.
One response to my article pierced my heart with a hot iron of sorrow, at the great betrayal and disappointment HH and the UPND have turned out to be, to the almost three million voters and even more Zambians who expected the UPND not only to be fundamentally different from the PF, but to immediately actually lower the already too high cost of living and doing business, as they had promised.
“l shed tears when l see what is happening. l thought HH would turn things around but the opposite is happening. HH is so proud of the whites because they sponsored his campaign but it is the Zambians who are suffering. HH is a total……. We don’t need him in 2026 and PF should never bounce back. To defeat UPND in 2026 the small parties must form a coalition. Among the opposition who do you think can be in the driving seat, Fred M’membe or Hamududu?” read the civilised response.
In our current political set up and its state, government, economy and society, it is perfectly logical, once one discards and precludes both the UPND and the PF from winning the elections in 2026, to ask: “To defeat UPND in 2026 the small parties must form a coalition. Among the opposition, who should be in the driving seat, Fred M’membe or Hamududu?” It could just as well be any of the other owners and leaders of the political choirs (political parties) in the opposition, other than Fred and Hamududu. And this, in my opinion, is part of our problem, we Zambians.
To decide to fully and properly resolve all our major crises including hunger, malnutrition, poverty, unemployment and inequalities which afflict the majority of Zambians I am not sure the starting point is to defeat HH and the UPND using any combination of “opposition parties”, at the head of which must be the owner of a political party, a current opposition politician. I do think we need to think deeper than this first, understand the history of our politics which has brought us to this painful mess and determine how best to deal with the underlying class, systemic, structural and world causes which have consistently produced governments which have terrorised, defrauded and impoverished the majority of Zambians.
It seems to me even if you put an angel in State House today with the existing state and government institutions, current civil servants, work cultures, a timid population which goes to sleep even before the election results are announced, a national cultural, religious, social, economic and political climate pregnant with lies, corruption and stealing, and without first agreeing upon the state transformation, political, social and economic programmes and how implementation of the same would be monitored and enforced by the millions of ordinary Zambians, nothing much would change other than the angel becoming lucifer, very quickly, upon becoming President of Zambia!
If there is anything our 59 years of independence and seven presidents have taught us, it is that we need to get away from the illusion and misunderstanding of politicians as our “political saviours”. It is clear they have all failed us and we Zambians, the majority of us who are working class and poor rural peasants can only redeem ourselves if we actually employ politicians and political parties to carry out our programmes which then we must demand implementation. To make sure this is done, we the ordinary Zambians must have the political will and constitutional and legal means to supervise and monitor implementation and have the power to recall any politician we deem unfit to perform according to our expectations, at any time; even before the expiry of their term of office.
Obviously, to achieve this kind of genuine democratic political transformation, we need to start a broad based cultural, social, economic and state transformation movement to centre the needs of the majority of Zambians who are the working class and poor rural populations in our society, economy, politics and government. We will then quickly discover that we have the solidarity and suffer the same problems as the majority of the peoples of Africa’s 54 countries, the working class and peasants of Asia, Latin America, South America, North America, Antarctica, Europe and Australia. We are, in fact, “the world’s people”: the producers and real owners of wealth.
We, the majority poor, hungry, struggling Zambians are part of the largest section of the world’s eight billion people. Over the past two years, the world’s richest one per cent, using politicians such as Joe Biden of the US, Hakainde Hichilema and Edgar Lungu of Zambia, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak of the UK, Félix Tshisekedi of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Emmanuel Macron of France, Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Olaf Scholz of Germany, Uhuru Kenyatta and William Ruto of Kenya, Shri Narendra Modi of India, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin of Russia and Volodymyr Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy of Ukraine – almost all leading politicians and presidents of the majority of the world’s 195 countries – have amassed nearly twice as much wealth as the rest of the world’s eight billion people put together! Meanwhile, the majority of the world’s people have sunk into deeper poverty!
This filthy rich one per cent exploit the global concentration of production and capital owned and controlled by monopolies which today dominate global economic life. This global rich one per cent by also dominating bank and industrial capital – today known as “finance capital” – are collectively a global “financial oligarchy” who decide how to deploy finance capital globally. This global financial oligarchy influences and determines the movement of money and goods on the globe. All governments, without exception, bend to the will of this global financial oligarchy, including the Chinese government, against the needs of their people. We then see that the world appears to be divided among these global oligarchies as markets, sources of raw materials and labour, by the use of military and political domination. Through the US government, they control the IMF and World Bank. This is the world we live in. This global system is also called “imperialism”.
Our politicians – the Lungu and HH type – survive from the rents, commissions, crumbs, and corruption as they compete among themselves to carry out the orders of any of the world financial oligarchies and the countries they control, in our country. Our politicians are the “receptionists” and “domestic workers” of foreign money against ordinary Zambians. None of them have the wish, ideas, vision, strategy or programme to free Zambia from the evil domination of the world’s financial oligarchies. They are rather content to act as parasites on foreign money in Zambia. It is this which explains why “foreign debt” is both a curse and blessing to them collectively, depending upon the specific economic conditions of our country!
Right now, for example, the HH type of parasitic politician cannot accumulate much wealth from the crumbs from foreign money because of our debt. Because we could borrow, the PF type of politician became rich when the PF was in office, until they defaulted! Both are parasitic on foreign finance, foreign money, which enters Zambia to plunder our natural resources and loot our extremely unsophisticated raw labour. In the process, both impoverish and punish us, for foreign money and for themselves, as individuals. It is absolutely important to understand all this, in order to appreciate the totality and complexities of the challenges we confront if we must end our national malnutrition, hunger, poverty, unemployment and extreme inequalities: we must contend with, and fight, simultaneously, the global financial oligarchies and their foreign governments and their local parasites in the likes of HH and Lungu, on Zambian soil and abroad! It is this which explains why any illusions that any single Zambian politician and their choir can “fix” our national problems is a fantastic infantile wish no Zambian should suffer from.
Only the determination, unity, intelligence, talents, creativity, inventiveness and political resolve and protracted combined peaceful and violent struggles of Zambia’s poor rural populations and urban workers – employed and unemployed – who are the victims of both foreign finance capital and its local puppets and surrogates in the HHs and Lungus of Zambia, can emancipate Zambia and set it up for genuine development. Any other route is self-deception and decidedly to end in tears, such as my reader is experiencing over HH and the UPND.
The ongoing current decay and collapse of the global capitalist system offers the best opportunity for countries like Zambia to confront their international and national tormentors and resolve to be free from both. Will we squander this opportunity either by retaining the UPND or sliding into the abyss of the PF, or a unity of both of them? The choice is ours.
Comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com.