UPND TAKING US NOWHERE
…we’re at sea politically, economically – Azwell
By Staff Reporter
AZWELL Banda says the UPND and Hakainde Hichilema have demonstrated extreme naivety and shocking ignorance about the state of the world and the global balance of power.
Reflecting on our Independence Day, Banda, a Zambian practicing Marxist and lifelong trade unionist, said today for Zambia “it could not have been at a worse time to be saddled with a pro-Western, pro-US and neoliberal government such as President Hakainde Hichilema and his UPND”.
“The UPND and Hakainde have so far demonstrated extreme naivety and shocking ignorance about the state of the world and the global balance of power, and how a poor but resource rich post-colonial country like Zambia must navigate the current volatile and completely unpredictable world,” he said. “Rather than place Zambia and Zambians at the heart of all their policies and programmes, they have prioritised the IMF, the US and the EU – all institutions dominated by a US whose wanning global hegemony and power is being challenged by Russia, India and China, and all self-respecting non-Western European powers.”
Banda said by August 12 last year when Zambia held its elections, “it was very clear that the US and the Western European dominated global capitalist economy was experiencing severe and terminal systemic and structural crises”.
“And that the world was poised for major wars, including a possible Third World War – a nuclear war – if the crises in the global capitalist system were to be dissolved, temporarily,” he argued. “There has never been a worse time for any post-colonial country to align itself with the US and the West than today. The US and the West have not only plunged the world into a global economic crisis which will punish poor countries like Zambia more and horribly, they are proving every day that they have no moral, philosophical, intellectual, ideological and political leadership capable of moving the world capitalist system out of its irresolvable crisis.”
Banda said the chaos in the British and US political systems are “a reflection of economic and social crises which have been brewing in these major capitalist and imperialist countries for a long time”.
“None of the political parties in the US or the UK can resolve these crises. And so, they resort to the only means they know best: wars to distract their local populations from the deep vicious domestic and international social and economic crises they have generated in the first place. From these wars, they hope to both profit massively, and re-engineer the geopolitical status of the world in their interests,” he said
Banda said proof that President Hichilema and the UPND are puppets of the US and the West, “and not good for Zambia is evidenced by the fact that neither the US nor the West will protest seriously at the erosion of the little democracy in the country by HH and the UPND government, as witnessed in the illegal, chaotic and thoroughly unconstitutional and undemocratic by-elections in Kabushi and Kwacha constituencies”.
“Historically, both the West and the US, in pursuit of their national interests in the post-colonial world have happily connived and worked with murderers, dictators and all sorts of undemocratic politicians and governments. HH is ‘their man’ and they look the other way as he consolidates his hold on our parliament by uncouth means,” he said. “[But] nothing stops Zambians from taking over the major means of economic activities in the country such as our mines, and scouting the world for both capital and necessary technologies and human resources. Only such measures accord with the times we are in and can enable Zambia resolve its poverty, unemployment, development and debt crises. HH and the UPND find it fit, 58 years after independence, with all the experience and suffering Zambia has undergone under foreign ‘investors’, to give our mines and other key economic activities to foreign money, aligned to South African white capital, the US and EU.”
Banda said it’s in the violation of “our Constitution, laws and state institutions thereby planting chaos in the electoral means by which our politicians alternate in looting and plundering us that HH and the UPND are opening up a completely new and violently unpredictable chapter for Zambia”. “As we reflect on our 58 years of independence it is time to ask: how can we make our politics and economy truly work for Zambians, the majority of Zambians?” poses Banda. “Thus far the ruling UPND is taking us nowhere. We are at sea as a country politically and economically.”