Maravi

Hichilema’s anger and frustration

Hichilema’s anger and frustration
By Editor
Monday July 28, 2008 [04:00]

Opposition UPND president Hakainde Hichilema is accusing us of harbouring colossal hatred against him and that we are bent on destroying his political career and his party. He says we are intimidating him because our preferred candidate is not doing well politically and for that we are using the newspaper to hammer Hakainde who is just doing a noble community service.

He asks who told us that we run UPND. He says we are trying to limit his freedom just because we own a newspaper. Mr Hichilema also says we are using the newspaper to insult him.

Mr Hichilema’s anger against us emanates from the editorial comment we carried last Wednesday headlined “Appointing a medical board for Levy” and some other editorials we have carried in the past. In the recent editorial, we pointed out that the last two general elections have produced phenomenal results, which have to be examined. We said two political parties in the name of Michael Sata’s PF and Hichilema’s UPND have emerged with significant wins in some key parts of our country but remain virtually redundant and irrelevant to our national politics.

And then we asked why? We asked why should politicians and political parties that win landslide victories in Lusaka, the Copperbelt and the Southern Province be moribund and irrelevant in solving serious national issues? We said the behaviour that these politicians are showing over the illness of President Levy Mwanawasa probably explains their irrelevance.

We said they are very steeped in meaningless and cheap politics. We also said their vulture behaviour renders them of little use to society and that we need to raise our political rhetoric to a level where it becomes a tool for political good and not just a means of getting to State House.

In the editorial complained of, we also said and we quote: “Sata and Hichilema control huge parts of our country politically but how have they used the influence they have? How can a political party that controls the Lusaka City Council and all the councils on the Copperbelt be irrelevant? Without insulting anyone, we have to say it’s because of pettiness, opportunistic behaviour and a failure to rise above demagogue and narrow personal interest.

A blind ambition for State House has robbed some of our politicians of the ability to appreciate the position they should hold in their country. Hichilema controls the whole of Southern Province; what is he doing to engage the government in a meaningful, productive and respectful way in order to extract benefits for the area his party seems to represent? The single-minded focus on the Republican presidency is emasculating our young multi-party democracy. When people fail to make it to State House, they fail to find any other meaningful role to play and quickly become irrelevant and sometimes destructive.”

These are some of the issues we raised in our editorial among others. Mr Hichilema says he was surprised that our comment of Wednesday, which was against the formation of a medical board to look into President Mwanawasa’s illness, attacked him for what he did not say, for no apparent reasons. Hichilema describes this editorial comment as nonsensical and that it was meant to destroy him and his party UPND.

This is what Hichilema is angry about. These are the words that he says are meant to destroy his political career and that of his party UPND. To him, we should not write about him and his party because we are talking of the subject of a medical board, which he himself is against. We find this to be shallow thinking for a person of his state.

We do realise the problems he faces, as he says that it is not easy to run a political party. And we really do sympathise with him over that.

We would advise Hichilema to direct his energy towards revamping his party so that it can have a purpose to the people of the Southern Province who gave him a landslide victory in the previous elections. The people of Southern Province did not give him and his party the landslide victory for nothing. They expected that vote to help in bettering their lives. They expected him to make a meaningful contribution towards the governing of this country. The people of Southern Province will not wait for that vote to be meaningful to them only when Hichilema becomes president. What if he never becomes president?

Hichilema should just admit that his presidency of the UPND has been problematic from the start. His problems in the UPND are like those of a child born with an incurable disease and the effects of that disease have become full blown. We talked against the way Hichilema rose to the presidency of UPND. We wrote against what motivated that. The problems we wrote against have become full blown. This is just the beginning of Hichilema’s problems and many more are yet to come.

Hichilema accuses us of intimidating him because our preferred candidate is not doing well. We challenge Hichilema to tell the nation who this preferred candidate is. We expect him to tell the truth. We find this worrying because we do not expect Hichilema, a man aspiring for the presidency of our country, such a high and noble office, to join the kind of discourse and rumour mongering that is prevalent among cadres and people of low literacy. It is meant for bars and tarvens. Mr Hichilema should know that we are not in the business of endorsing candidates. Our practice has been not to do so. We will endorse a candidate only in extraordinary circumstances. And we feel we are not yet in such a situation.

Who is this preferred candidate he is referring to? Is it All People’s Congress Party president Ken Ngondo? Is it FDD president Edith Nawakwi, United Liberal Party president Sakwiba Sikota or is it Patriotic Front president Michael Sata? We rule out President Mwanawasa because he will not be aspiring for office in 2011. Then who? And he should show the nation our bias towards that candidate. Hichilema has in the past accused us of being compromised and biased towards ULP president Sikota and we found that laughable.

Is it Sata? If it is Sata let him show us which other media institution criticised Sata on a number of issues, days before the previous presidential and general elections. Is it not PF cadres who wanted to kill us, accusing us of being biased against their candidate? Anyway we are used to these kinds of accusations. We find these kinds of accusations when people are going through a rough patch in their various careers. Even some clergymen have accused us of being biased. And the story has quickly died out the moment they sail through.

Labels: HAKAINDE HICHILEMA, THE POST, UPND

posted by MrK @ 5:05 AM