Levy and the poor
Levy and the poorBy Laura Miti-Banda
Saturday August 25, 2007 [04:00]
And so President Levy Mwanawasa figures that poor Zambians who cannot afford to educate the children they bring into the world should keep their zips up. He cannot understand why the majority poor people in the country do not know better than to involve themselves in activities whose by-product is children.
Leave sex to us the rich damn you; he just about said at that place from which he loves to announce official government policy- the airport.
Very annoyed he was you see at the suggestion that parents of the poverty stricken children were finding it difficult to pay PTA fees at schools. What kind of nonsense is that, the big man exploded in response to MMD Copperbelt Province chairman, Terence Findlay? The man had ventured to relay to the powerful one this cry for help from the deprived, some gathered to welcome him. How can anybody in their right mind claim that they are not able to pay a little something towards their children’s education, the mighty President railed?
The government has scraped school fees for goodness sake. What else do you want us to do? All that you ungrateful poor people are asked to do now is pay PTA fees. These PTA fees (Levy argued somewhat bizarrely) should be easier to cough up because, unlike school fees, they do not come to government. PTA fees are not part of the government revenue that I and my ministers use to pay for our children (who unlike yours had the right to be born) to go to the 10 million kwacha a term Chengelo School.
It is not from those amounts that I fly up and down to different airports to address you. That money (which each school can set as it pleases in the name of school bus fund, wall fund, floor polish fund on and on ad infinitum (he might has well have added) stays in the school. So what on earth are you complaining about?
The President did not end there. He had more to say to the foolish man who had dared raise such a stupid issue with him and so he went on sounding more disgusted with each point: Next thing, Levy said, these poor people will be saying to government buy clothes for our children because we are too poor to clothe them. I have one thing to say. You have come to the wrong person with your whining.
You will find no sympathy with me. I say to you stand up and plead guilty to your poverty. Do not bring children into the world if you cannot take care of them. Child-bearing is the prerogative of the rich. As for you poor people, just keep on gathering in large crowds like this to welcome me when I arrive at airports. This kind of thing makes me very happy.
I guess the President was suggesting that for a society to function, each class must know its place. It is not for the poor to propagate (their inferior genes.) Levy must think also that if poor people were wise enough, the population in townships and villages would by now have reduced considerably. In that way he could rid himself of all the annoying civil society activists endlessly moaning about poverty alleviation strategies when the answer is the hands of the poor themselves –no copulation.
To be quite honest, I have kind of been waiting for President Mwanawasa to say that he was misquoted by The Post when they reported this diatribe. Yes we have become quite accustomed to the man’s by turns arrogant, bizarre or downright dumb public statements. With this one however, one has to ask, what on earth was the man thinking? (Or was he not, as usual?)
Interestingly in this same week, Levy found time to announce once again that he is a “lawyer wama lawyer.” The best there is. So is Minister of Justice and Attorney General. Greatly educated men these ones( with the right, of course, to do the things with their wives and girlfriends that lead to child-bearing) One is forced to ask, how did one Levy Mwanawasa, like most people his age, a son of a not much educated father and almost certainly illiterate mother end up being this “great lawyer”?
At the time he himself was born, did his parents have the right to give birth to him? Was it written in the stars the day of his conception that he would end up at the University of Zambia getting a law degree.
Had this Levy been born at this time to his very parents, under a President like him how far would he have gone in education? Is he suggesting, I wonder, that all those dusty, wet-nosed children we see running around the compounds with stomachs distended from malnutrition and worm infestation are vermin? That the government has no responsibility to them because they should not have been born anyway? Does he really think there are “lawyer wama lawyers” there?
Simply, what kind of buffoon does this country have in state house that he does not know that every child is 100 percent potential? It is a government’s prime duty to seek to develop that potential knowing that nobody knows from where the next Yotam Muleya, Lucy Sichone, Charles Mando, Paul Ngozi, Emmanuel Mulemena, brilliant Zambians that this country has failed thus far to replace, will come from.
In short I am saying Levy owes the country an apology for insulting the majority Zambian population. In stating that the poor among us have no right to hope that the child they hold in their arms may be a great light in their lives one day, he once again displays for all how totally out of touch with the needs and aspirations of the people he presides over this Levy Mwanawasa is.
lauramiti AT yahoo.co.uk
Labels: LAURA MITI-BANDA, MWANAWASA
posted by MrK @ 6:16 AM
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