Maravi

Sooner or later Zambia will be successful

Sooner or later Zambia will be successful
By Editor
Monday March 03, 2008 [03:00]

It is time we started addressing the issue of economic dependence seriously. In six years’ time our country will have been independent for fifty years. And six years is not a very long period. It will soon be 2014 – the year of the 50th anniversary of our country’s independence. It’s time we started looking back over what we have achieved as a country since we became independent over 43 years ago.

What the Russian Ambassador to Zambia Anvar Azimov is reminding us about dependence on loans and donor aid is something that we must start meditating over deeply as we approach our 50th independence anniversary. We can’t continue to be a dependent country, a poor country for over half a century.

Kwame Nkrumah once said “seek ye first the political kingdom, and everything else will be added unto ye”. Very little has been “added unto ye” since our political independence in 1964. Why? We must agree that real liberation or breaking away from the imperialist system of political and economic domination is not achieved by the mere act of proclaiming independence. Freedom is achieved when imperialist economic domination over a people is brought to an end.

Some people have even said that “political independence is meaningless if we cannot feed ourselves”. Without economic independence, we cannot say our independence is complete – it is half or even less. And Saint Just has warned that “he who makes a revolution by half digs his own grave”.

Clearly, political independence – that independence we got from Britain in 1964 – guarantees us nothing by itself. It offers us instead the opportunity to succeed as well as the risk of failure. The promise of independence is social, economic and political progress, in short happiness.

Political independence is then both a promise and a challenge. It is a promise that as free human beings living in an independent country, working together, we can govern ourselves in a manner that will serve our aspirations for personal freedom, economic opportunity and social justice. It is a challenge because the progress and development of our country rests upon our shoulders as citizens of this country and no one else.

Josef Brodsky, a Russian-born poet and Nobel Prize winner, once wrote, “A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.” It is true as well for us as citizens of this country who, finally, must take responsibility for the fate of our country.

We therefore need to exert ourselves much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful; those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image.

We have had to contend with the consequences of subjugation in a denial of our own role in history, including the denial that our people have the capacity to bring about change and progress. We will not make much progress if we do not start approaching the practical problems we are facing by using our own heads. This may seem to be an abstract and rather vague opinion but it is something very important.

We can only move forward if we start to see things for ourselves and make our own decisions. We cannot continue to be dependent on formulas and programmes decided by others - who may even be our competitors - for us.

What is frightening is that we are not giving much thought on how to engage the world around us. We are not coming up with our own ways of doing this. Truly, no country in this world can solve all its problems by itself. This by itself means that to make progress, one needs to know how best to engage others. The Latin Americans are analysing the global situation for themselves and are coming up with their own formulas of how to survive and prosper in today’s fast globalising world.

When one talks to our political leaders, their ignorance about the global situation is frightening. The only things they regurgitate are commandments they have memorised from the Washington Consensus and a few things they learnt from their clerical duties in the corporate world. We are not trying to insult anyone by this because even when we look at the corporate world itself, what businesses did our politicians really manage other than the raping of state institutions and being figureheads on the boards of some transnational corporations? What they are talking about is economic and political engagement with other countries, with other peoples that will have a significant impact on our economic welfare and progress.

Here we are also talking about our businessmen engaging in partnerships with foreign enterprises in a manner that is beneficial to our country not where they are just used as fronts, given a few shares for which they have paid nothing and just to be used as contacts with corrupt local, political or government officials.

We will only make progress if we as a people develop high skills, effective and efficient strategies and tactics in our dealings with other countries and their business enterprises.

Anyway, there is some hope – we are starting to wake up. What is happening with mining taxes, albeit small, is a good start in the right direction. But a lot more needs to be done on all fronts and in all sectors.

And here we are not even prescribing any form of economic system. We don’t feel this is necessary because no contemporary state has an economic system that is either completely state-owned or totally free from government regulation. All are mixtures of private enterprise and government oversight.

Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons us now. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil our independence pledges.

And so, we have to labour and work; and work hard to give reality to ouand we have to face them squarely. We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for anyone of us till we redeem our independence pledge in full, till we make all the people of Zambia what destiny intended them to be. We should not continue to tolerate narrow-mindedness for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action. We share Ambassador Azimov’s optimism that “sooner or later Zambia will be successful”.

Nevertheless, the past is over and it is the future that beckons us now. That future is not one of ease or resting but of incessant striving so that we may fulfil our independence pledges.

And so, we have to labour and work; and work hard to give reality to our independence dreams. Independence brings responsibilities and burdens and we have to face them squarely. We have hard work ahead. There is no resting for anyone of us till we redeem our independence pledge in full, till we make all the people of Zambia what destiny intended them to be. We should not continue to tolerate narrow-mindedness for no nation can be great whose people are narrow in thought or in action. We share Ambassador Azimov’s optimism that “sooner or later Zambia will be successful”.

Labels: ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT, INDEPENDENCE

posted by MrK @ 4:17 AM