Maravi

(EDITORIAL) Time has come for honesty in politics

Time has come for honesty in politics
By Editor
Tuesday July 03, 2007 [04:00]

It is frightening that today the board of the Zambia Centre for Inter-party Dialogue (ZCID) can defend Katele Kalumba over the corruption charges he is facing in our courts of law. In civilised societies, when politicians are facing serious charges against the people, the state, they usually relinquish their public functions until they are acquitted.

Yes, every accused person is innocent until proved guilty. This is not a matter of fact, it is an assumption of law. For the state to take Katele to court for corruption, there must be some reasonable grounds; there must have been some reasonable proximity to the crime levelled against him.

When Katele was elected national secretary of the ruling MMD, many people questioned the morality of his election and denounced the insensitivity of the members and leadership of this party. And for this reason, Levy Mwanawasa found it unreasonable or undesirable for Katele to be included in his Cabinet or take up any government position under his discretion. It is clear to us that corruption is not an issue with our politicians. It is something tolerable, it’s not a big deal. It only becomes an issue if somebody is imprisoned for corruption but when he comes out there will be no problems dealing with him politically.

This is the nature of our politics. This explains why the members of ZCID see nothing wrong with Katele Kalumba being their chairman. Hence the besetting temptation for all of them to defend Katele and to concern themselves only with the immediate present at the expense of the future.

It is clear that Zambia is in trouble today not because her people have failed, but because her political leaders have failed. And what Zambia needs are political leaders to match the greatness of our people. We must work unceasingly to lift this nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of intolerance to corruption or wrongdoing.

There is need to realise that if an issue is morally right, it will eventually be political. It may be political and never be right. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. We shouldn’t surrender to the corrupt politics we are witnessing in our country today. Experiences like these breed character. And character breeds faith. In the end, faith will not disappoint.

Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly. This country is not short of decent men and women for us to cling to those facing criminal charges in our courts of law to be our leaders. But all this is not the main problem. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We feel morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.

We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as honesty and humility lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological perculiarlities. When we talk about contaminated moral atmosphere, we are not talking just about our politicians grouped in ZCID who are defending Katele’s corruption charges today. We are talking about all of us. We have all become used to corruption and have accepted it as an unchangeable fact and thus helped perpetuate it.

In other words, we are all – though naturally to varying extents – responsible for this corruption; none of us is just its victim: All of us are also its core creators. Why do we say this? It would be very unreasonable to understand the sad legacy of the Chiluba era as something alien, which some distant relatives bequeathed us. On the contrary, we have to accept this legacy of corruption and the impunity that goes with it as the sin that we committed against ourselves.

If we accept it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We cannot blame Chiluba for all the corruption that is going on in our country today, not only because it would be untrue but also because it could blunt the duty that each of us faces today – the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and in an honest manner.

As we have stated before, let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. This calls for the participation of, and responsibility from, us all.

If we realise this, hope will return to our hearts. The heroes we were remembering yesterday – on Heroes and Unity Day – based their politics on morality. Let us try in a new time and in a new way to restore this concept of politics. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of a desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community.

Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of calculation, intrigue, secret deals and pragmatic manoeuvring, but that it can even be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves, our country and the world.

Let us not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom once again under the fair mask of the desire to serve the common good. It doesn’t really matter what political party we belong to. The important thing is that all those in politics must be the best of us in the moral, civic, political and professional sense. The future of our country will depend on the personalities we select or appoint to our representative bodies. What we dream of is a republic of well-rounded people, because without such, it is impossible to solve any of our problems, human, economic, ecological, social or political.

We cannot achieve all this with men and women who are facing criminal charges in our courts of law for having abused their offices being in charge of our political processes.

If ZCID wants itself to be trusted as an organisation that can effectively contribute to our constitution review process, there is need for its members and board to change their attitudes towards corruption and abuse. It is very clear that our politics are contaminated with corruption and ZCID is not free from this vice. It therefore cannot be trusted as a vehicle for carrying out our constitution review process. This is probably why its members have been accused of all sorts of things, including being there for allowances.

Their attitude towards Katele does not engender confidence. What can one expect from an organisation whose chairman is facing criminal charges, corruption charges?
Time has come for us to demand honesty and integrity in politics! Politicians of the Katele type should have no place in our politics at all levels.

Labels: EDITORIAL, KATELE KALUMBA, ZCID

posted by MrK @ 3:58 AM