By Pamela Bwembya
WHY DOES PF WANT TO COME BACK SO EARLY?
I listened attentively as grandpa read out a portion from his favorite newspaper loudly;
““Differences are a fact of life; but it is the management of those differences that distinguishes the disciplined from the undisciplined; the reasonable from the unreasonable; the wheat from the chaff. Universities are after all founded on reason and academic excellence. We therefore appeal to University and Tertiary education students to think twice before they resort to wanton destruction of property.”
“Grandpa, why was Hakainde addressing the students like that when there has neither been a record of destructive behavior from students nor fatal confrontation between police and students anywhere under the New Dawn government?” I asked.
“No dear! That was Davis Mwila, SG of the Patriotic Front on the 10th of April in 2019,” he replied.
“The beginning of the quote misled me into thinking the words came from someone that fully appreciated discipline,” I replied.
I remembered how this same man challenged his party members in Kabwe to grab most of the land made available by local authorities. The words “Mulefwaya nkamiletele commando” rang clearly in my head.
“I am convinced that if this same portion was read out by our current president, a well known former ambassador would waste little time to analyze each line and expose the apparent untruths in it. I can imagine the overzealous man telling us how violence is inevitable when the ruled feel uncared for. Examples would fly with names of forgotten pre-independence freedom fighters filling the air,” I said.
The PF in opposition are like a fly that will irritating buzz around even when the food in your hand is fresh and unimaginably delicious. These guys think all Zambians are idiots. The recent twists and turns on the Resettlement Infrastructure Investment and Enterprise Support (ARIISE) programme that was signed by Vice President Inonge Wina a day before losing power prove the point.
Grandpa had continued reading but something seemed to tell him my mind was in wonderland. Whatever it was, was not far from the truth because my mind kept on regurgitating some lines from the article and chewing them again like cud. The lines that followed grabbed my attention;
“It is for this reason that the vision of the Ministry of Education under the PF government is geared to provide Quality, Lifelong Education for all which is Accessible, Inclusive and Relevant to Individual, National and Global Needs value Systems. In achieving this aspiration, the PF government has taken practical steps to make education affordable to all eligible learners by reducing or completely doing away with school fees that were identified as one of the barriers to accessing education at various levels. A listening PF government is ‘minimising’ the cost of education for parents and guardians towards the education of their children,” grandpa read on with a smile.
The word ‘minimising’ had been possibly left that way by a cocky News Diggers editor to emphasize the audio nuances expected from the PF SG.
The smile that lingered on grandpa’s expressive face was a product of an earlier debate on the differences between the former PF government and the New Dawn government. What grandpa had just read clearly cemented his position. It became clear to me that governments always inherit the same civil service. That is precisely why the civil service is expected to be apolitical.
It is clear to me that the technocrats that pushed the PF to reduce school fees were still in their offices and calling for a well-researched topic of the benefits of free education for all. The 2011 article by Alice Mapenzi Kubo on the abolition of school fees in Africa is a perfect example.
PF introduced a terrible culture of placing their political cadres in strategic positions as required by the PF manifesto. It is surprising that the current government is expected to maintain such chaps when the UPND manifesto does not openly take that line.
I find it interesting to see the PF try hard to convince the majority of Zambians that we made a mistake by voting for their proven nemesis. PF had a chance to do what the current government is doing. They arbitrarily reduced school fees and proceeded to starve learning institutions of funding. They padded almost all known public contracts with all sorts of extras so that it will be practically impossible for the many that labor to count beyond one ‘sousand’ to take stock of what was being pocketed. That is the difference!
The PF government had a chance to pay farmers, release the small amounts of CDF to constituencies, pay a number of retirees, or even scrap off school fees totally BEFORE THE LAST ELECTIONS, and yet they failed miserably. I am not sure what to attribute those failures to. Could it be that various big guys were responsible from stealing from specific sectors of our economy in an arrangement that saw some ministers end up with exotic animals on their newly acquired properties?
I totally agree with Davis Mwila. “Differences are a fact of life; but it is the management of those differences that distinguishes the disciplined from the undisciplined; the reasonable from the unreasonable; the wheat from the chaff”.
I hope the people of Kabwata are smart enough to understand that every ngwee collected by the new government is finding its way to the treasury and is shortly afterwards coming out as the unbelievable releases of money towards various sectors of our economy. Hakainde and his team are not using their personal money to pay farmers, schools, retirees, and councils timely. They are using the same money that was previously available to a PF-led government. Of course over ten years, that money made the then president, his family, his ministers, influential political cadres, and compromised civil servants become rich enough to settle our national debt if they so wished.
People of Kabwata, when Clement Tembo asks you what needs to be done urgently in your area, tell him there is still some smelly garbage that needs to be either buried or recycled into something useful. The Patriotic front must be buried or transformed into something useful to all of us.
When I gathered myself to the present, I looked at the old man and his old paper and wondered how both survived the PF era. JUST WHY DOES THE PF WANT TO COME BACK?
PB …always in national interest.