WE need to do away with the leadership of a turtle shell and brainless sycophants, says Jack Kalala.
In a statement, former president Levy Mwanawasa’s special assistant for projects monitoring and implementation urged PF leaders to cease trivialising God and prayers.
Kalala noted that the country was currently facing so many complex and thorny socio-economic problems.
“I wish to make an earnest appeal to genuine church leaders and servants of God to urge their members to pray for wisdom to vote wisely next year for credible men and women with brain capacity to take up the leadership challenge of our country. We need to do away with the leadership of a turtle shell and brainless sycophants,” he said. “Zambia needs selfless men and women in leadership who will be there to serve the people, not themselves. Zambia needs men and women who will work to uplift the standard of living of the people. Zambia needs men and women who will work tirelessly to move the country, using their intelligence, from poverty to prosperity using the resources that God has abundantly endowed the country with. China, South Korea and Singapore have not developed using prayers but their God given intelligence and resources.”
Kalala said it was his considered view “as a Christian not by declaration but by faith and deep conviction in the existence and supremacy of God”, that the national prayer days in Zambia that are politically organised are meaningless and sacrilegious in the sight of God as they are held not to honour God but to serve political motives.
He said instead of promoting love, unity, faithfulness, humility and reflection, those ‘prayers’ were used to promote hate and to gain political mileage by taking advantage of the gullibility of the unsuspecting public, mainly the less privileged of society.
“They are also used to denigrate political opponents. Take for example the prayers that were held on Saturday 22nd February 2020 at Mulungushi Conference Centre to pray to God for intervention to resolve the criminal activities going on in our country. Human beings living amongst us commit these heinous criminal acts. We have the police and other security agencies to deal with them but, instead, we choose to organise national prayers to seek God’s intervention to resolve a purely human problem requiring a human solution,” he noted. “Is it not lack of reasoning capacity and common sense to call upon God to come down to resolve human acts of criminality? What is then the duty of the police and other security wings? Where have we heard in the world that God came down or sent his angels from heaven to arrest criminals who were terrorising citizens in a particular country? Isn’t it training to build capacity of our men and women in uniform that is required, in case capacity is lacking?”
Kalala said if Zambia lacked capacity to resolve the problem at hand, “why don’t we invite others with capacity to come and help us just as we have sent our men in uniform to assist others who lack capacity?”
“Our country is currently facing so many complex and thorny socio-economic problems. If we do not have the capacity to solve these human criminal acts, how do we expect to resolve the complicated socio-economic challenges besetting us?” asked Kalala. “We have many problems in every sector of our society; do we expect God to send his angels to come and solve them for us? What is the use of the grey matter in our heads? Is it for creating prayers and songs only?”