Maravi

It's all about political advantage

It's all about political advantage
By Editor
Monday February 19, 2007 [02:00]

WE welcome Michael Sata’s reaction to our editorial comment of Wednesday February the 14th, urging him to change his politics. But what surprises us is why in his reaction he totally decided to ignore the issues we raised in our editorial comment of the previous day - Tuesday February 13, 2007 concerning the choosing of Levy’s successor.

We raise many issues every day in our daily editorial comments; we exhort our politicians to meditate over many issues, delve deeply and truthfully into them, with broad-mindedness, listening to everyone. We do this without in any way thinking that we are the owners of absolute truth. We have a duty to write editorial comments every day and over the last 16 years we can confidently say we have discharged this duty with sufficient honour and integrity.

What we have written - wrong or right - is what we believe to be the correct position, to be the best approach. But again, what we believe is not necessarily the absolute truth.
We have come a long way in our work. Those who love us today were yesterday among those who hated us or detested us most. For us people have never been neutral - they either love or hate us with a passion. We are used to this kind of thing. We know where we are coming from and we will never forget the past because those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Our lives teach us who we are. We have learnt the hard way that when you permit anyone else’s description of reality to supplant your own - and such descriptions have been raining down on us, from politicians, clergymen, chiefs and their indunas, fellow journalists, friends and enemies and so on and so forth - then we might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered absolutist world-view is the easiest to keep hold of; whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture we have always carried about is rather more vulnerable.

Yet, we must cling with all our might to that chameleon, that chimera, that shape-shifter, our own souls; must hold on to their mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges us into contradiction and paradox, so be it; we have lived in that messy lake over the last 16 years. We have fished in it for our journalism.

For us what is most important is that whatever the odds we have been able to do, what we thought was right. To us, this freedom to express our own view of what is going on in our country and the world is the whole thing, the whole ball game.

This freedom is life itself.

When we called for loyal opposition we did so out of principle and not any expediency. And this is not the first time over the last five years or so that we have called for loyal opposition. We know this is a difficult concept to accept, especially in emerging democracies with very weak democratic culture and institutions of the state.

But it’s a cardinal one whose implementation we should not postpone until we get an election result that no one questions or one which everyone welcomes.

As we stated in our editorial comment, the loyalty we are calling for is not to Levy Mwanawasa and his government per se or to his specific policies and practices, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state, and to the democratic process itself.

We are not trying to build a one-party political system in this country but a multiparty one. And we have a lot of problems in trying to firmly establish multiparty politics in this country. We saw in the first decade of the return to multiparty politics how UNIP in opposition was decimated by Frederick Chiluba’s government and the ruling MMD, of which Sata was a key and influential member.

We therefore feel it is necessary to correct or deal with whatever problems we may face in our efforts to build multiparty democracy in our country in a manner that moves us forward and not backward to one-party rule.

We appreciate that Sata and others may feel what we are saying is negative or sounds negative. But we have always thought it positive to say that the important thing about democracy is that we can remove without bloodshed the people who govern us. We can get rid of a Kaunda, a Chiluba or even a Sata by internal processes. If people lose the power to sack their government, one of several things happens. People may just slope off. Apathy could destroy democracy. And when this happens, we are in danger.

People can riot. Riot is an old-fashioned method of drawing the attention of the government to what is wrong. It is difficult for an elected person to admit, but riots do produce some reforms. Riot has historically played a much larger part in our politics than we are ever allowed to know. Nationalism can arise.

Nationalism is built out of frustration that people feel when they cannot get their way through the ballot box. With nationalism comes repression. We hope that it is not pessimistic - in our view it is not - to say that democracy hangs by a thread in every country of the world. Unless we can offer people a peaceful route to the resolution of injustices through the ballot box, they will not listen to anyone who has blocked off that route.

We agree with Sata that election petitions are not easy to win in our courts of law. This is very true. But why is it so? Is it not because of the laws that Sata and his friends enacted to protect the Chiluba government from any such challenges?

These electoral laws which our courts are interpreting and are using to adjudicate over electoral disputes were put in place by these same people who today congregate in Patriotic Front. It is not the courts that are being difficult over presidential election petitions - they are merely interpreting the law as it stands, as it has been enacted by our legislators.

As for us, we are used to being labelled anti-this or anti-that, or pro-this and pro-that. If we criticise those in government, then we are seen to be anti-establishment and pro-opposition. If we criticise UPND then we are accused of propping up Sata and the Patriotic Front.

Ours is never seen to be criticism per se, there is always an agenda attached to it.

And there is too much bragging about being elected by this one or that one. But there are many people, many good people who have lost elections or have not received the most votes but still stand out in terms of being correct, in terms of being morally right. Dr Martin Luther King didn’t have the most votes about the Vietnam war, but he was morally right. If we are principled first, our politics will fall in place. And if an issue is morally right, it will eventually be political. It may be political but never be right.

The fact that Sata and the Patriotic Front scored very high votes in our cities in the last elections doesn’t make them morally right on every issue. We saw how Chiluba abused the overwhelming electoral mandate he was given by the Zambian people.

The constitution Sata is complaining about today was put in place by his friend Chiluba - and with Sata’s support. They governed this country on that constitution for a whole term. They gave the Zambian people such a constitution just to entrench themselves in power. Sata was not opposed to this constitution. The people who were opposed to this constitution resigned from Chiluba’s government. And the best example of such people is Dipak Patel and Simon Zukas.

Again, by saying all this we are not anti-Sata or anti-Patriotic Front. We have never been anti-any individual, we are anti-certain practices and policies.

And we still maintain that Sata and his party shouldn’t look to defeating the MMD at the next elections on the back of national failure. There will be sufficient ground without that to argue for their removal at the next elections. The problems we have with our electoral processes can still be addressed in a manner that is consistent with our aspirations to build a strong multiparty political system in a democratic way.

And these problems - definitely do make loyal opposition a difficult undertaking - should not stop our politicians in the opposition from doing everything possible to engender the necessary cooperation with those in government to solve the many problems facing our people. If The Post’s call for such an approach to politics is seen to be a contradiction, a negation of its editorial principles, then we don’t know what is right. We know our history better than anybody else. We know what we did over the years and why we did it.

It is not fair for those who were against what we did in the past and crucified us for it to try and interpret that history for us today; school us on our own work. We don’t claim supreme wisdom over others but surely, fairness and honesty will recognise the fact that we know a bit more about our own work.

The problems with our friends in politics is that when you criticise them - no matter how correct or right you may be - you are an enemy, a supporter or proponent of their political opponents. It’s all about political advantage you are giving them or you are taking away from them to their opponents.

Labels: DEMOCRACY, EDITORIAL

posted by MrK @ 5:29 AM