MMD presidency
MMD presidencyBy Editor
Sunday January 20, 2008 [03:00]
Now that the ruling MMD has officially sanctioned campaigns for the party presidency, there is need for all of us to be very clear what this process means. The campaign that stretches before us now is not only a struggle for the soul and heart of the MMD, it is also a struggle for the souls and the future of Zambia. Most of all, all those who are going to participate in this process are the trustees of a dream.
As we have stated before, we are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with a fierce urgency of now, in the unfolding life and history. We must work unceasingly to lift this nation to a higher destiny, to a new plateau of fairness, justice and humaneness.
We will need to go back to the politics of the early days of our Republic, to the politics based 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 nation rather than of a need to cheat or rape the nation.
Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals and pragmatic manoeuvring, but it can even be the art of the impossible, namely, the art of improving ourselves.
There are many months of campaign ahead of us by those vying for the MMD presidency. Let us not allow this struggle to divide our country, to make our politics dirtier than they already are. Let us not divide our people through our becoming entangled in the jungle of skirmishes for power.
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 is not really important now which candidate wins the MMD presidency or will prevail in these coming party elections. The important thing is that the winner will be the best among them, in the moral, civic, political and professional sense.
MMD members should not forget that the future policies and prestige of our state will depend on the personality they select to be their presidential candidate in the 2011 elections.
There are people who think the MMD presidential elections are an internal process that should not attract much national interest. This is shortsighted thinking.
They are forgetting that whoever is put forward by the MMD as a presidential candidate in 2011 is likely to be among the top contenders in those elections. Therefore, he or she stands a good chance of being the next president of our country. Moreover, we should pay attention to everything that goes on in all our political parties. And it will not only be us doing so.
The American people, and indeed the entire world, are following closely the processes for selecting or electing the presidential candidates for the Republican and Democratic parties of that country. Why is this so? It is simply because this process leads to the election of the next president of the United States. Therefore, these primaries are not simply a mere internal party process for the Republicans or Democrats.
There are a lot of good things we can learn from the way the American primary elections.
In these elections, the struggle is often not to determine which candidate commands the greatest support, but who can most effectively motivate his or her supporters to convert their opinions into votes.
If we don’t conduct our party elections in an efficient and orderly manner, it is highly unlikely that we will do better when it comes to national elections. But if we conduct our party elections in a manner that is free and fair, we stand a better chance of doing the same when it comes to national elections in 2011.
Elections are very important and a lot of attention should be paid to them because they are the central institution of democratic representative government. The authority of government derives solely from the consent of the people and the principle mechanism for translating this consent into that type of authority is the holding of free and fair elections.
But we should never forget that the holding of such elections is not the only way of choosing leaders or representatives, it is not the only democratic procedure for taking power especially where the electoral processes are so often prostituted to falsify the will and the interests of the people and so many times used to put into office the most inept and the most shrewd, rather than the most competent and the most honest.
After so many fraudulent elections, after so much false and treacherous politicking, after so much corruption, the people cannot be made to believe that the only democratic procedure for them to choose their leaders is the electoral procedure. If this becomes the case, people may decide to choose their leaders not with a pencil but with the blood and lives of fellow patriots.
We therefore, urge the MMD members to ensure that in this unfolding campaign, virtue opens a way for itself, merit prospers, and greedy conniving and cheating fail. And only the firm – those with true convictions and absolute loyalty to the Zambian people and MMD itself – are elected.
We also urge the Zambian people – from all walks of life – to take a keen interest in these MMD elections, analyse them, meditate over them, speak out or comment on them. However, this does not mean that whoever emerges as the winner in these elections automatically becomes the next president of the Republic of Zambia.
There will be other contenders from other political parties who will equally deserve more or less the same attention and scrutiny. At the end of the day, the best among all these should be our next president. The 2011 presidential elections will be very important because the next 10 years will be crucial for our development as a country and as a people. If we turn this into another lost decade, then it will take us a very long time to recover and see a reversal of fortunes.
We say this because the opportunities for development that seem to be available for us today are highly unlikely to be there for us over a long period of time, over more than 10 years from now. It is therefore, important that in 2011 we construct a leadership for our country that will be able to guide the nation through this very complicated epoch.
In this period, we will need leaders who are not just out to fulfill a personal ambition or pleasure. We will need only those who are out to fulfill a duty, heart and soul, to serve the cause of our people.
Labels: MMD, PRESIDENCY
posted by MrK @ 6:59 PM
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