Maravi

Sitting on a time bomb

Sitting on a time bomb
By Editor
Monday April 07, 2008 [04:00]

It is true there is a problem of wealth divide in our country. This is not the Zambia most of us grew under. We grew under a Zambia where the gap between the have and the have-nots was very small. We grew under the Zambia where the children of the so-called well-to-do attended the same schools and hospitals as the children of the so-called poor.

The children of the president of our country and other top government officials and company executives went to the same schools as the children of the peasants and workers. What mattered was not the child’s parents’ social position but the child’s own abilities, the grades the child got. That was what mattered. This is no longer the situation.

Children of the poor, the peasants and workers of our country attend different schools, go to different hospitals and even shopping malls. There is very little interaction among those belonging to different social classes. We used to talk about apartheid in South Africa.

Today we could talk about apartheid in our own country, where over 70 per cent of our people are deprived of the most basic rights of all human beings: the right to life, health, education, clean drinking water, food, housing, employment, hope for their future and the future of their children.

We are firmly convinced that the current economic order imposed on our people is not only cruel, unfair, inhuman and contrary to the inevitable course of history, but it is also inherently discriminatory against the poor and other lower classes.

This economic order is devoid of any solidarity. Solidarity is a basic fact of human existence. No person is an island, cut off from others and self-sufficient. We should always try to remember the African proverb: “I am because we are, and we are because I am.”

It is said that it is not hatred alone which is contrary to the laws of charity but also indifference to the welfare of our neighbour.

When people think only of themselves and their own particular group, social or otherwise, then there is division and frustration. We have to create a sense of solidarity and fraternity among our people. We can’t continue to see increasing gross inequalities among our people and pretend all is well or this is acceptable.

Today some of our people are having much more than they need and are dying of heart attacks and cholesterol, while others starve to death.

We shouldn’t forget that our country belongs to all of us, and its riches should also belong to all of us. Every citizen should be made to feel they count. Inequality causes terrible suffering to human beings and it shouldn’t be allowed to grow in our country without being controlled.

Inequality has serious effects on human beings and their happiness. People need honour, dignity, respect and to be treated like human beings. The irritating differences between the well-to-do and the poor are increasing in our country.

The majority of our citizens can today be said to have been alienated and are considered worthless.

The only time they are considered is during elections when they are taken to vote for someone every five years without even knowing who they are voting for or why – because, often, as a result of their poverty and vulnerability, their low political cultural level and low cultural level in general don’t give them a chance to decide freely.

They are influenced by all the mechanisms for exerting mental and psychological influence in decision-making – and then nobody cares about them any more.

There isn’t any sense of identification between such people and the state, the government and the society in which they live. They are condemned to a desperate struggle for survival without any social worth, respect or consideration.

It is not possible for a country carrying so many inequalities to remain politically and socially stable. A struggle is bound to emerge between the well-to-do and those who have nothing; and this struggle is bound to be accompanied by hatred.

And no one will need to preach hatred to anybody because it will arise on its own from this struggle. One can’t speak of harmony and unity in a society that is divided in this way, where there are terrible inequalities, and where people are not guaranteed even their human condition.

We share the concerns of Citizens Empowerment commissioner Dillion Chipungu about the need for a total change of mindset and transformation of our economy. As we see it, loving thy neighbour means practicing solidarity. We don’t think there is any fraternity between those who have everything and those who totally have nothing. To hope for fraternity under these circumstances would be sheer fantasy.

Let’s make it a principle to seek man’s broadest material and spiritual development. And we might even add man’s development in the religious sense. These stifling inequalities constantly give rise to great numbers of marginal persons, ill-fed, inhumanly housed, illiterate, and deprived of political power as well as of the suitable means of acquiring responsibility and moral dignity.

We need a new economy that can generate new values that will pave the way for a society that evinces more fellowship and brotherhood. In such a society, the workers would shoulder their proper role with new dignity. We should commit ourselves to thoroughgoing and urgently needed social transformations.

Any and every effort to fashion a more human society, to eliminate poverty by promoting the common good over private interest, demands the support of those who are committed to human liberation. This support can and should be offered through serious minded criticism with a genuine concern for the common good.

The structures of our country must be transformed from the roots up. Only by gaining economic and political power will the poor of our country be able to construct a society that is qualitatively different from the existing one in which everyone will have the same possibilities for human fulfillment. We should therefore aim toward the creation of a qualitatively different society.

By this we understand a society where in the willingness of justice, of solidarity and equality reigns, one that will respond to generous aspirations and the search for a more just society, and where values, particularly freedom, responsibility and an openness to thing spiritual, will guarantee the integral development of humankind will be realised.

In order that this kind of society be developed, it is necessary that the education of all the people include the social and communal meaning of human life, in the total context which includes culture, economics, politics and the whole society.

Education thus conceived will lead to creation of a new human being and a new society where democracy is real through the effective political participation of the members of our society, through the human concept and realisation of work, through the submission of capital to the needs of the whole society.

There is urgent need to pay serious attention to these growing inequalities in our country. If we don’t, we are sitting on a time bomb.

Labels: POVERTY

posted by MrK @ 4:22 AM