WE NEED TO BE CRUEL IN ORDER TO BE KIND TO OURSELVES.

Authored By Mupishi Jones.

To expect Zambia to recover from it’s economic decay left by the PF regime within a few months is expecting too much! The damage made to this country by the Edgar Lungu led administration requires bold decisions.

Top on the list of these damages is the debt stock….disclosed and undisclosed, internal and external combined!

It’s like a woman who marries a man only to discover that all those glittering goodies she was seeing at a distance were obtained on credit and the owners were up in arms, vowing to grab everything the man owns.

The Zambian economic scenario vis-a-vis debt status is a very precarious one.Truth be told,any option to be taken to come out of this unfortunate dilemma, will injure some citizens. Whichever way we take, some of our citizens will be bruised somehow.

Zambians have to undergo through pain before they begin to get better. Some decisions that will make us come out of this mess are tough ones .We just have to be abit cruel to ourselves if we want to be kind to everyone.

To make it more clear,let me use the following example to explain what I mean by being cruel in order to be kind.

The Zambian economy is sick,no contest about that. It needs tough, brave and courageous leaders and not the faint hearted.

It’s like a father in a village who’s only child has been shot at and the bullet is still stuck in his body.

The child has been crying, gnashing his teeth in pain especially when the father attempts to remove the bullet from his body. Each time the father attempts to operate the bullet, the child cries hysterically and uncontrollably.

Touched by empathy, the emotionally father abandons the operation and instead joins in crying. As a temporal measure, the father embarks on administering pain killers to his child. Each time the child takes pain killers,he felt better and they would start chatting happily together.

This arrangement went on for days and weeks. What the father and his child didn’t realize was that as long as the bullet was still lodged in the child’s flesh, the bullet wound was going to continue festering becoming more dangerous to the child’s life.

One day the child’s Uncle came to visit after news of his nephew’s sickness reached him.
The health condition which the Uncle found of his nephew was beyond expectation.

The nephew’s bullet wound was fast degenerating into cancerous situation. Any further delay to remove the bullet would claim the life of the child.

To save the child’s life, bold, unfriendly and uncomfortable decisions had to be made. The only option was to remove the bullet by whichever means .In the short run,the pain would be excruciatingly painful, even to a point of fainting. But the Uncle was determined to be cruel in the short run in order for him to be kind in the long run.

Because the father considered himself a christian who wouldn’t withstand the pain of the child,he sympathised with the pleading child not to operate him because it was too painful an exercise.

The Uncle chased the father threatening to beat him up if he interfered with his operation work. The Uncle called a few brave men in the village to assist in tying the hands and legs of his nephew whilst he was bravely conducting the operation of dislodging the bullet.

Indeed the process of removing the bullet from the festering wound was an extremely painful one and not for the faint hearted.

The tied child’s cries and wailing could be heard throughout the village as the Uncle went on to remove the bullet.

Finally, the Uncle successfully removed the bullet.

He then went ahead cleaning and sterilizing the open wound before administering pain killers to his nephew.

A few days later, the nephew was on a noticeable recovery path, forgetting all those unprintable insults he was hauling at his Uncle during the operation.

This is what I meant when I said that to come out of the current economic mess, we need bold, unfriendly and uncomfortable decisions. The decisions which others ( Sean E. Tembo ) are advocating for this country are good but they’re like pain killers.

Good for the short run and not helpful in the long run.

What President Hakainde Hichilema and his Finance Minister intend to do is like the brave Uncle .We cannot continue to apply paracetamol in the form of subsidies in the belief that it’ll cure the lodged bullet wound in our flesh.

We cannot continue subsidizing pump fuel price in the belief that we’re helping ourselves in the midst of the piling debts! The question is are these compulsory subsidies sustainable in the midst of high debt stock? Subsidies must be treated like pain killers after undertaking a painful surgery.

This is meant to cushion the aftermath pain of those who will be bruised in the process. At this stage,we don’t have the luxury of applying compulsory subsidies even to those who don’t need them!

Countrymen, removing subsidies is part of the surgical process of resuscitating and raising our economy from the death bed! Keeping a lid on subsidies is tantamount to continue administering pain killers instead of being brave enough to operate the bullet from our flesh.

By advocating for continuing with subsidies is merely procrastinating the problem. The sooner we face it, the better.

When the PF government was recklessly contracting this debt, economist were warning us that this debt would be paid by the citizens and not the PF leadership.

This is what they meant. Therefore, the recovery of stolen (debt) money from the former PF governing elite must be viewed as a process of making them help the citizens in paying back recklessly borrowed money to the owners.

I submit

Mupishi Jones

Provincial vice youth Treasurer western Province UPND

+260977480386