Let's build a nation with pride in itself
Let's build a nation with pride in itselfBy Editor
Wednesday August 13, 2008 [04:00]
Our daily deeds as ordinary Zambians or as political leaders must produce an actual Zambian reality that will enforce our people’s belief in justice, strengthen their confidence in the nobility of the human soul and sustain all our hopes for a glorious life for all.
This means that we shouldn’t make the work that has gone on here benefit just a few. Let us build a nation with pride in itself. A thriving community, rich in economic prosperity, secure in social justice, confident in political change. A land in which our children can bring up their children with a future to look forward to.
This calls for our leaders, and all our people, to seriously work and meet the challenges of nurturing the economic growth of our country to ensure that it benefits all our people – and not just a few.
As United Nations Development Programme country representative Macleod Nyirongo has correctly observed, our country’s growth rate over the past eight years means that we have an opportunity to extend public services to all our people. There is no need to boast about improving economic indicators when these do not benefit the people in any way. We had very high levels of copper mining and good copper prices before independence but what did our people benefit from that? Some even say that Zambia’s economy was very good at independence. How can this be so when almost all our people lived in poverty, with ignorance, illiteracy, with very limited education and health facilities? You can’t develop a country without developing its people and call that development, and say you are making progress.
This is clear to us that nothing will come easy for our people. They have to wage a relentless struggle to improve their lives. This is not the first time foreign investment is coming into this country. But like in the past if we don’t work hard and claim our fair share, we will continue to remain in poverty.
We wish not to preach the doctrine of ignoble ease but the doctrine of the strenuous life; the life of toil and effort; of labour and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes not to the man who desires mere easy peace but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimately triumph.
A life of ignoble ease, a life of that peace which springs merely from lack either of desire or of power to strive after great things, is as little worth of a nation as of an individual.
We do not admire the man of timid peace. We admire the man who embodies victorious efforts; the man who never wrongs his neighbour; who is prompt to help a friend; but who has those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life. It is hard to fail; but it’s worse never to have tried to succeed.
In this life we get nothing save by effort. Freedom from effort in the present, merely means that there has been stored up efforts in the past. A man can be freed from the necessity of work only by the fact that he or his fathers before him have worked to good purpose. If the freedom thus purchased is used aright, and the man still does actual work, though of a different kind, he shows he deserves his good fortune. But if he treats this period of freedom from the need of actual labour as a period not of preparation but of mere enjoyment, he shows that he is simply a cumberer on the earth’s surface; and he surely unfits himself to hold his own with his fellows if the need to do so should again arise. A mere life of ease is not in the end a satisfactory life, and above all it is a life which ultimately unfits those who follow it for serious work in the world.
As it is with individual, so it is with the nation. It is a base untruth to say happy is the nation that has no history. Thrice happy is the nation that has a glorious history. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much because they live in the grey twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.
These are the men who fear strenuous life, who fear the only national life which is really worth leading. They believe in that cloistered life which saps the hardy virtues in a nation, as it saps them in the individual; or else they are wedded to that base spirit of gain and greed which recognises in commercialism the be-all and the end-all of national life, instead of realising that, though an indispensable element, it is after all but one of the elements that go to make up true national greatness. No country can long endure if its foundations are not laid deep in the material prosperity which comes from thrift, from business energy and enterprise, from hard, unsparing effort in the fields of industrial activities; but neither was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity alone.
Our country calls not for the life of ease, but for the life of strenuous endeavour. This century, the twenty first century, has come to us big with the fate of many nations. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease, and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by and will win for themselves everything. Let us therefore boldly face the life of strife, resolute to do our duty well and manfully; resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word; resolute to be both honest and brave, to serve high ideals, yet to use practical methods.
This is the only way we can build a nation with pride in itself. A thriving community, rich in economic prosperity, secure in social justice, confident in political change. A land in which our children can bring up their children with a future to look forward to.
Labels: PATRIOTISM
posted by MrK @ 4:53 AM
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