Maravi

Our people will triumph again

Our people will triumph again
By Editor
Friday August 22, 2008 [04:00]

It is said that all it requires for evil to triumph is for good men and women to remain silent. Isn’t it true that many people stand by while wrong things are happening hoping that someone else, other than themselves, will do something about it? Many societies have degenerated into chaos and destruction because good men and women kept quiet about the wrongs and vices that they saw, hoping and believing that somebody else would do something about it.

This is also true about a simple thing like litter. Most people do not like litter. But we still have a lot of litter which grows into garbage. The reason is simple. Although we do not like litter, we expect somebody to clean it up. We think it is enough to express a dislike for litter and everything will fall into place, it will clear itself. This is a sin that a lot of good women and men commit.

Everybody likes good governance, including crooks and despots, to the extent that it affects them. Most people want to live in an orderly society, a more just, fair and humane society. But they don’t want to see it as their duty to build that society. They don’t see it as their duty to make a contribution to its realisation.

Many people do not like thieves, even thieves don’t like other thieves to steal from them – to steal that which they themselves have stolen. But they don’t see it as their duty to hunt for thieves and bring them to book, to cleanse society of crooked elements.

As we mourn President Levy Mwanawasa, we need to be very honest with ourselves. We need to ask all the difficult questions that have to be asked.

Death is a difficult human experience. Although universal and inescapable, and seen as a necessary end of life, it still continues to confound us. It is difficult during the time of mourning to see any beauty or advantage in such a painful experience. Adversity is only useful to mankind if we can extract some advantage from it. We must, we have no choice. Levy is dead. Why are we mourning him? Is it Levy we are mourning or are we mourning for ourselves? Have we lost something that we need to identify?

Levy brought a sense of integrity and confidence back to government. He transformed the way people view government. He worked hard to erase the nichekeleko culture of corruption that his predecessor, Frederick Chiluba, had bequeathed him. In accepting an anointment from Chiluba, Levy accepted a very difficult job. He accepted pressures that were almost impossible to surmount. But he chose to go ahead, anyway.

We never supported him in that acceptance. But he made very fine use of it, anyway. And as we had pointed out yesterday, Levy showed us a connection between opportunity, choice and commitment.

Having gotten his opportunity to become President, Levy could have continued the corruption, the thieving of his predecessor. But he made a different choice, a choice in a different direction. He instead chose to fight corruption, to fight the banditry of his sponsors. And this is why today Chiluba and his tandem of thieves are where they are, found with cases to answer and put on their defence on corruption charges. Indeed, as things have turned out, some of them are already in jail. Others have been convicted but are on bail pending appeal.

This is also why some of them like Atan Shansonga who thought were clever by running to London have already lost part of their loot as a result of the decisions of the London courts. Soon, the London judgment will be registered here and Chiluba will have to lose almost everything he had stolen.

It is no wonder these crooks are not sleeping, they are spending sleepless nights scheming, trying to come up with political formulas to reverse Levy’s legacy by ensuring that he is succeeded by a person they can manipulate and control to get their cases discontinued by government.

At the last election, Chiluba crossed from MMD to opposition Patriotic Front (PF) saying twachula pafula (we have suffered enough). As he went to cast his vote, Chiluba told the nation that he had gone to vote out the bad and vote in the good. In this case, the bad was Levy and the MMD. And the good was Michael Sata and the PF.

Chiluba, who during his tenure as president, had little respect for the rule of law wants to go back to that lawlessness. It is clear from the statements he has started issuing that he is looking for a hole, an opportunity to take Zambia backwards for his own sake, to save his own neck.

We have studied Chiluba very closely for the last eighteen years. It is never too difficult to discern when he has got a scheme. We challenge anybody who will contradict us to simply wait and see.
As Chiluba preaches constitutionalism in the MMD, we just must ask ourselves why and which constitutionalism is he talking about. But maybe that is a discourse for another day.

All this tells us that there is a lot of litter in our politics, a lot of garbage. If we want to live in a clean country, we have to work, we have to participate and take part in cleaning it. And there is no contribution in this regard that is small. It is said that what a single ant brings to the anthill is very little; but what a great hill is built when each one does their proper share of the work.

We are mourning Levy because he brought about common decency in our politics. He worked hard to restore confidence in government. Although it took very long for our people to appreciate this, in the last two years many have begun appreciating the work that government has been doing.

There are a lot of problems still. But we seem to have embarked on a good direction. It is this that the demise of Levy has robbed us of. His death threatens continuity. It threatens the gains that we had begun to record. We need to understand that nobody but ourselves is going to fight for Zambia.

There are too many in our country who are voiceless. Each one of us who has a voice needs to fight for them. We must never allow the impunity and shameless plunder of the 1990s to be comfortably accommodated in government. For our part, we will continue to fight the fight we started many years ago. Even if we are the last left fighting, we will fight for as long as we are able to breathe, if this is the fate life has in store for us.

Like all people, we desire rest, leisure and comfort. But not at the expense of the future of our country, of our people. We have to learn to fight for what is good in our country. We have to champion and defend it. We cannot fight this fight on our own. It is not possible. It is not even right. This is why we believe in mobilisation, we believe in the involvement of everyone, we believe in a mass movement against injustice, against evil. Everyone has a role to play in ensuring that we don’t go through reversals, that what we have won is not lost.
Plunderers and those sympathetic to them, regardless of how much they try to disguise themselves, must be stopped. They must be fought.

We do appreciate that Levy’s death is a big disadvantage for the good people of this country. But there are few misfortunes, disadvantages in this world that are permanent, that one cannot turn into a personal triumph if one has the iron will and the necessary skill. As long as one has an iron will, one can turn misfortune into fortune, disadvantage into advantage.

Those who think or want to deceive themselves that with Levy’s death they will be able to turn our country back to the decade of the corruption, the plunder and human rights abuses of the Chiluba era, are deceiving themselves. For them to achieve this, they will have to kill many of us.

Our people took them on at the height of their power and plunder and triumphed. All their criminal schemes, including the third term attempt, failed. Even the handpicking of Levy backfired on them. This should teach them something about our people’s capacity to do what is right, what is needed when the time comes. This time again, we are more than confident that our people will triumph over evil schemes.

posted by MrK @ 5:09 AM