WHY HAVE WE BECOME A NATION THAT TOLERATES CORRUPTION?

WHY HAVE WE BECOME A NATION THAT TOLERATES CORRUPTION?
By Faston Mwale – SP MCC

The rising spate of corruption involving high profile business politicians within the circles of the UPND government proves the point that government’s pronouncement on the fight against corrupting is nothing more than political rhetoric and a cover up. The question that begs answers is: How can the same leaders that have flatly refused to publicly disclose their net worth play a front role in the fight against graft?

Unless and until we the citizenry see the high frequency waves of corruption involving enormous amounts money as a contradictory social reality, we risk becoming a nation that tolerates corruption rather than abhor the vice.

It is a sad reality that today, we the struggling masses have been shackled to unsustainable debt servicing mechanisms that are perfectly ravaging our livelihoods and lives for loans that were contracted in our name, yet the loaned money went into the pockets of the greedy self-centered business politicians to capitalize their businesses so that they could earn more profit to sustain their lavish lifestyles.

For over three decades Zambians have been victims of crude forms of corruption for which there is seemingly no ending in sight as the current crop of leaders do not have the ideological tools needed to tackle the vice. Today, we are experiencing the crudest side-effects of corruption. The load-shedding crisis is one of them. How can a mineral rich and fertile country of the 21st century age be grappling with the basic necessities of life such as electricity, water, sanitation, housing, fuel, food and clothing? How can a country that produces cotton, for example, be importing vast quantities of handkerchiefs? Is it not weird that a country that has bamboo canes growing all over the country is a net importer of toothpicks?

Under the guise of draught, the citizens are everyday being sentenced to prolonged power supply outages, yet the crippling crisis of power supply also results from power exports. In a normal functioning democracy, all our leaders would be forced to resign for lack of foresight, forward planning and corruption.

The cause of our predicament lies in the perversity of the socio-political and economic system under which we live. Unless this fact is understood and internalized, we will always miss the point. It is not so much about the moral degeneracy of an individual but much about the capitalist system of governance whose logic is to breed corruption, inequalities, waste, abuse and looting of state resources especially by those in public institutions. Corruption has permeated nearly every sector of governance. Look at what is happening in the energy sector, education and health sectors, for example. It is easy to see that corruption has become a permanent feature of our governance, a sad reality.

Let us not tolerate corruption.