UPND, PF leaders are all the same: we don’t need them
By Azwell Banda,
Incredibly, in less than 18 months of Hakainde Hichilema (HH) and his United Party for National Development (UPND) government, the abominable Patriotic Front (PF) can smell government power, again.
Meanwhile, the egocentric, selfish and sadistic UPND are pathetically pleading that we, the majority of Zambians, must not make the mistake of returning the PF into government even if they, the UPND government, starve us to death or kill us because of lack of jobs and medicines in hospitals. Instead of focusing on what both of them have unleashed on Zambians – sorting out the high cost of living, hunger and needless Zambian deaths stalking the country – the PF and UPND leaders have erupted into a potentially deadly tribal civil war!
It is now very clear that the UPND and PF leaders, and especially HH, are all pathologically addicted, and dependent, on government, because without it, they and their businesses cannot survive. They all need government to steal, corruptly enrich themselves, and to access both government and foreign money for their personal businesses. This explains why the UPND was in opposition for 23 years, and the PF, for a decade. President Kenneth Kaunda fought this kind of selfish, greed unpatriotic politician, including by promulgating a “Leadership Code” for UNIP leaders in government. He failed. In 1991, their kind removed him from government and pure hell on earth was loosened, upon the majority of Zambians.
There can be no better proof that our post-independence economy and its entire political system and society are thoroughly rotten, expired and have become dangerous barriers to our national unity, development, prosperity, peace and happiness than the fact that at a time when millions of Zambians are starving, frustrating electricity blackouts are wiping out the little economic activity millions of Zambians survive on, clinics and hospitals have become waiting rooms to the nearest grave, fuel, transport, food and rent are out of reach for millions of Zambians; our leading politicians in the two main electoral parties have erupted instead into a vicious and deadly tribal war, over government.
Nearly 60 years after our so called “independence”, nothing best confirms the fact that our economy and society have rotted, collapsed, totally disintegrated beyond reforming than the fact that neither our economy nor our entire Zambian society can guarantee food, just enough nutritious food, for every hungry Zambian. To confirm this sad fact, we have in government today, in HH and the UPND, a government thoroughly selfish and impotent to act, to prevent millions of Zambians from dying from the simplest food to produce: maize.
Just like the PF who proposed we resort to eating sweet potato for breakfast, the UPND now advise we consume roller maize meal because it is cheaper than breakfast maize meal. Anyone still suffering from the pathetic illusions that HH and the UPND are in government to reduce the cost of living needs an urgent serious mental check-up.
Arrogantly, the lying UPND leaders are completely disregarding their deadly false neoliberal economic logic: should the majority of Zambians who today survive on breakfast maize meal start buying roller meal, roller meal, which is already too expensive for most Zambians, will be priced beyond reach even for the few better off Zambians, as the massive surge in new demand would push up prices of roller maize meal!
The PF, too eager to hypocritically exploit the obvious deadly disaster that the UPND have proved to be, are on political steroids working overtime to erase from our memory their violent, thieving, corrupt, undemocratic, authoritarian and state institutions collapsing behaviour when they were in government. They are now actually defending and praising their record when in government! Thankfully, cartoonish Miles Sampa, now brutally and ruthlessly swiftly suspended from the PF central committee for six weeks, has savagely “undone” the massive PF efforts at attempting the impossible: delete from our memory what the PF did to Zambia when they were in government – terrorise and rob us.
Any brain dead Zambian who had begun to develop the fantastic illusion that the PF had changed, rebranded, 17 months after their massive humiliating loss of power (truth be told, we now must understand that the UPND did not win the August 2021 elections, it so happens that the PF actually lost power because Zambians withdrew their mandate to govern from the PF – in the event, even a wingless grasshopper would have been preferable to the continuation of the savagery of the PF in government!) need only imagine the horrors they would unleash on Zambians should we ever make the impossible blunder of returning them to government.
Zambians humiliated the PF, on August the 12th, 2021, by nearly unanimously withdrawing their political mandate to govern, from an arrogant, authoritarian, thieving, lying, corrupt and violent PF. In the face of overwhelming national hunger, malnutrition, poverty, a collapsed economy and destroyed state institutions, having defaulted on government debt, the PF actually believed they would win the August 2021 elections, because they thought, the majority of Zambian voters were properly terrorised, incapable of thinking straight and recognising what the PF had turned out to be.
By savagery throwing Miles Sampa out of their central committee for six weeks at a time when all PF presidential hopefuls (hopeless fools) should be canvassing for votes among potential PF elective conference delegates, the PF has just rudely reminded all of us Zambians who they still truly are: a thoroughly undemocratic, intolerant, brutal and completely untransformed political party! PF presidential hope fool Miles Sampa’s right to hold a political opinion contrary to any existing internal formal positions of the PF at this time as the PF advances towards its elective conference needed to be protected by the PF central committee, to promote and defend free speech and internal democracy in the PF, and to confirm that the PF has changed for the better, no matter how unpalatable this would be, to anyone. The PF central committee have failed crucial democratic test.
Meanwhile, the UPND have proved beyond any reasonable shred of doubt that between serving and saving the lives of Zambians and money, they will serve and save money and profits, consistently, all the time! Only a cruel, insensitive and sadistic political party and government would celebrate serving and saving some government money when doing this cost Zambian lives in our clinics and hospitals, and from hunger.
It takes a cold, heartless and ruthless political party and government, in a country in which the largest social and economic occupation is impoverished, untransformed, unmechanised rural agriculture, at a time of global food insecurity and national hunger and malnutrition, to deliberately delay, frustrate and limit government support in the provision of seeds and fertilisers to millions of impoverished rural farmers. To celebrate the “savings” from this kind of government cruelty is pure sadism, insanity. The UPND government has legendary cruelty and contempt, against the majority of the people of Zambia.
Nothing best confirms the heartlessness, complete disdain and contempt for our impoverished rural farmers than that agriculture minister Mtolo Phiri and Hakainde Hichilema think that all Zambia needs for their reckless mishandling of the 2022/23 farming season is a contemptuously proffered fake “sorry” while they celebrate the government money they have “saved” from this debacle. Zambian lives will be lost because of hunger from this sadistic behaviour of the UPND government.
Meanwhile, we all know the UPND has given foreign mines the best ever tax regime, and other policies. They have even handed over all government shares to some foreign copper miner, in exchange for, believe it or not, Zambian government tax returns to FQM. Meanwhile, they are not going to stop maize exports, as Zambians face rising prices of maize meal and shortages of the commodity. They are pretending they are impotent to install supply and price controls on a national staple food. “Survival of the financially fittest” is their concealed cruel slogan!
At a time of great potential for Zambia to prosper, the UPND, through the IMF, are busy extremely cheaply pawning off Zambia’s natural wealth to the US, UK, EU and their merciless allied global capitalist oligarchies. Meanwhile, Zambians are left to die of starvation, because the UPND will not stop exports and effect price controls on vital foodstuffs, to satisfy the IMF. The UPND are thus politically effectively laundering the abominable PF.
Today, from August the 24th 2021, in HH and the UPND, we have that section of our parasitic politicians who saw and exploited the massive opportunities for themselves to become fabulously rich from privatising government as they threw millions of Zambians into mass hunger, malnutrition, extreme poverty, unemployment and grotesque inequalities, as they concealed their private greed and selfishness by preaching and practicing a decadent version of fundamentalist “free market liberal economics”.
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. They are both wrong, absolutely wrong. Zambia does not deserve both the UPND and the PF. For Zambia to survive and thrive, we must ditch both of them. In the articles to follow this one, I will explore our genuine emancipatory alternatives.
Comments to: banda.azwell@gmail.com.