My comments last time. This time there can be no mistake!
Zambia elections…
Sunday, August 12, 2007
In but 12 hours or so, Joyce and Eunice, two widows with a host of children to
look after - not all their own, will shut the door of their huts and walk
through the dark to the polling station at the school in Chainda, Lusaka, to
cast their votes. For the first time ever, this vote, this referendum for a
light out of the dark, is being taken seriously. For years these two salts of
the earth have had to suffer the verbal froth of politicians, their lot growing
more desperate, the mouths at their pots added like beads to a string as
HIV/Aids and a distant Government consign them to deeper poverty. Not that this
is Somalia, where the normally effulgent rains found in Zambia is unknown,
where clan brigands hold sway with the gun, where the glow of western liberal
democracy is but a distant memory. But, hell, they do want change.
They want the Chinese cadre supporters of the ruling party out, not
the Chinese and other investors in infrastructure, mining and agriculture, but the
‘Chinee’ flogging eggs in the compounds and shanty towns, let in through some
invisible process not available to the normal investor who has to suffer – and
fork out, for the endless circuits of the Immigration Department at the
execrable Kent House - a re-make of Vichy France Casablanca, for the Zambia
Investment Centre blandishments, for the host Ministry for what-ever, for the Banks with their forms
endless, for the grasping government departments and their harvesting
civil-servants, and for the bloody speed cops sequestered in the shade but a
mile from the airport, pens poised, collecting their salary…
Joyce and Eunice: no English, no skills, just the good people of an old culture
not yet embracing the terrible allure of the industrial age, witch bound…
wanting a government that will remove the necessity for school uniforms, that
will pay the teachers and buy the books, and provide the free medicines in the
clinics – not the ‘free of medicines’ clinic, that will provide a bloody house
with water and a clean bog. For God’s sake!
Sunday, August 12, 2007
To Bonaventure and the PF family of comrades…
As we approach two months at the controls of the good ship Zambia a lot of us are thinking about the journey so far, and about the course ahead.
Many of us suffer from a slight attack of entitlement, a condition brought on by being at the core of much that lead to the election victory, perhaps having suffered at the hands of the MMD, or grieving at the depths we have sunk over the last 36 years – certainly the last 21 years. We feel that the state should recognize us and reward us in some way, the appointment of Xavier making this attack of entitlement more acute. We must get over this.
Zambia requires that we take on board the lessons to be drawn from our history, and that we take on responsibility for steering the ship of state. We must not leave this to politicians and bureaucrats.
Our great challenge is to unite our many tribal nations, speaking many tongues, into an African participatory democracy, but more importantly, into a recovered state of moral legitimacy. This is the task to be undertaken by our Patriotic Front government, a Christian government voted in to provide socio-economic justice. We must ensure that such justice is delivered.
To do this will require that we insist on a government very different from the dishonourable and discredited MMD government that plundered Zambia for two decades. We require a government with a moral compass, one dedicated to the land and to the poor, to Christian ethical virtues, ‘to a world of self realization in service to others, to institutional arrangements based in some sense of common interests, to technological and organisational innovations orientated to the pursuit of the common good’ – surely something revolutionary in a country where revolution for the common good has been so singularly absent.
To bring this about we must not look to the West and their economic models; that way is continuing failure. We must look to our communal cultural heritage. We must find and adopt an alternative way to that of plunder capitalism. We must stop borrowing and begging, we must work at the grassroots for the common good, we must give in order to receive.
I.P.A. Manning
How is the Great PF Family of Comrades doing? God bless you all and have a great day!
Bonaventure Mutale.
On Mon, Aug 15, 2011 at 4:56 AM, I.P.A. Manning <ipama...@gmail.com> wrote: