Maravi

Division and tension

Division and tension
Written by Editor

Last week, the Catholic bishops in their pastoral letter observed that last month’s presidential election has left the country more divided than ever before.
And this week, Council of Churches in Zambia secretary general Rev Suzanne Matale and Patrick Chisanga have made similar observations.

It cannot be denied that there are serious divisions in the nation. It cannot honestly be disputed either that there is tension in the nation.

Why should this be so after the country is said to have held free, fair and democratic elections? How can such elections result in divisions?

The truth is the seeds for the divisions and tension we are seeing in the nation today were sown at the very beginning of last month’s election campaigns. It started with Rupiah Banda’s call in Chipata to the people of Eastern Province not to entertain presidential candidates who hail from other regions of our country coming to campaign in the province. He appealed to them to tell them to go back where they come from. We criticised him heavily for that careless, reckless and highly divisive statement. Rupiah never denied having made that statement. And he was right in not attempting to do so because we have a recording of what he said.

Rupiah never attempted to retract or apologise for what he said. Instead, Rupiah and his campaign team decided to go for us for reporting and commenting on what he said.
It is time the nation realised that we reap what we sow. If we plant seeds of division, we should not expect to harvest peace and unity in the nation. The divisions we are seeing today were created by our politicians, especially Rupiah and some key members of his campaign team, some of whom are today Cabinet ministers in his government.

We hail from all corners of our country and have joined together for a common progressive purpose – to develop our country for the benefit of all of us. And if we are to achieve this objective, we must all show concern for everyone, and all our people must be taught to care for each other, must love and help each other.

We must all realise that the unity of our people and of our various regions is the basic guarantee for us to achieve our objective as a nation. Only through the unity of the whole nation can we overcome the problems and challenges facing our country. And for this reason, it is imperative to overcome anything that impairs this unity.

Whatever politics we engage in should as far as possible promote unity. It is not possible for us to seriously talk about democracy in a country that is divided, in a country that is gripped by tension. For us, democracy means that governments are closely linked to the people, arise from the people, have the support of the people and devote themselves entirely to working and struggling for the people and the people’s interests. Democracy implies the defence of all the rights of citizens, including the right to dignity and honour. For us, democracy means fraternity and true equality among all the citizens and equal opportunities for all the people and for every human being who is born.

The type of democracy we are practicing doesn’t seem to contain any of these elements. How can we talk of democracy in a country with so much division, so much inequality? What chance do the poor, especially those who live in far-flung areas of our country, have in this democracy of ours? What we have is simply an old trick, an old tale, an old story. What we have done is to establish a system of domination with all the resources of wealth and everything else in the hands of a group that maintains discrimination and excludes the rest of society from any real or meaningful political participation and from any real or meaningful possibility of exercising their rights. We have seen this type of politics before in history. It was there under Greek democracy.

People used to cite Greek democracy as an example of democracy from the classical age of Greece. Athens, which was a prototype of democracy, had 40,000 citizens – men, women and children – and 90,000 slaves. Around 35,000 of the slaves worked in workshops and in agriculture, 20,000 were women who were house slaves, 10,000 were children who provided various services and 25,000 worked in mining. For every free man, woman and child in Athens, there were more than two slaves. Even the great historians and philosophers had slaves – we are not criticising them, because they were products of their society. A slave wasn’t anything; they were human beings who could be bought and sold, or even killed.

We wonder, really, what great difference there was between that society and this society that we are trying to exalt. It is really difficult to accept and identify with this kind of democracy which is being used to weaken our country and divide our people into ten, 72 or 150 pieces so that they can’t solve problems. There is no real participation by the people in this kind of democracy. What we are calling democracy is nothing but a mechanism that serves as a tool for the abuse of the ordinary people of our country.

For us, democracy is something else. One can’t say that democracy arose in Athens. People have spoken of Athens, but it was a divided society, it was a society full of inequalities and injustices, discrimination and abuse. We think that divisions and certain injustices must disappear before we can have real democracy. We are absolutely convinced of that. As long as there are enormous inequalities and divisions among human beings, there isn’t – there can’t be – any democracy. There can’t be democracy in such a society because it is the supreme expression of the savage struggle, lack of equality and fraternity among people.

When you analyse this problem from all angles, you see that you can’t call what we have democracy because true democracy is government of the people, by the people and for the people – a government in which all the people participate.

And since we have declared this country a Christian nation, let us try to look at the whole issue from a Christian perspective. With divisions, inequalities and other injustices that we are creating or we are tolerating, what type of nation or nationalism can we really talk about in this country? We say this because nationalism is a true and well-thought-out love for one’s country, an expression of fraternal love, of solidarity and of service to the common good.

There are indications in the Gospel that Jesus loved his own small country, so little thought of and maltreated at his time. He shared its destiny, its sufferings, its humiliations. He was completely an Israelite: his physical appearance, his clothes, his language, his customs, the examples which he gave, the stories which he told, his style of speaking, his whole way of life showed that he was a Jew, faithful to his race and to his people. As our Lord loved his country, so we love ours and wish it to have peace, prosperity and a fully representative government in which everyone shares and participates.

Nationalism, like many other good things, can be deformed or distorted. This fact should put us on guard against those dangers which weaken national unity. The first deformation is to be found in the narrowing of scope of true nationalism, when it is reduced to fostering the interests of only one section or group of inhabitants of the country. Some have wished to identify nationalism with an unrestricted adherence to a particular type of government, or even to a specific ruling party.

Others consider true nationalism to be the perpetuation of the spirit and form of a particular historical epoch. There are those who attribute a monopoly of nationalism to a single sector of the community, an influential sector, without doubt, but one which cannot pretend to exhaust the human reality of the country. No single sector has a monopoly of deciding what the true national interests are.

Nationalism should be expressed in actions, in daily works and tasks, in justice and in solidarity. Citizens should cultivate a loyal spirit of patriotism, but without narrow-mindedness, so that they keep in mind the welfare of all.

Another deformation of nationalism is tribalism. It is the competitive and excessive exaltation of one’s own tribe. It seeks to assert its superiority over the others. The Christian vision is universal, with all human beings seen as brothers and sisters within one family. It is not necessary that my tribe should be superior to other tribes in anything. It is enough that it be faithful to its own identity and purpose, that it contributes what it can to the common cause and receive the contributions of others in a mutual collaboration and exchange. All throughout history, tribalism has been the cause of innumerable divisions, conflicts and wars.

Among the tribes, as among individuals, dignity is a virtue and pride is a vice.
Tribes, like countries, are not closed groups. They are but a small part of a wider society: that of the human race. It is not by segregating ourselves from those who are different that we shall preserve our own particular achievements. It is by sharing them that we become richer. It is by spreading Christian values that we shall defend our faith. Refusing to share our achievements is one form of underdevelopment; refusing to learn from others, is another. We should open our minds and hearts to the human values to be found in the language, customs and culture of the people who are about us.

It is for these reasons that we urge Rupiah and his sponsors to find ways to remedy the divisions they planted in the nation through their divisive campaigns. They have a duty to find a painkiller to the toothache they planted in the nation that is today causing so much tension in our compounds, townships and other places. An ostrich approach to politics will not do. Continual denials of reality will not do.

Rupiah has to face the realities of the divisions and tension he has planted in this country. Sometimes it’s not easy to clean up one’s mess, help may be needed and it should be given. But it has to be sought or they have to open themselves to it. If they don’t deal efficiently, effectively and in an orderly manner with these divisions, with this growing tension, these may soon devour them. And they may perish in this tension because, as they say, when the rain comes, it won’t fall on one man’s house.

Labels: REGIONALISM, TRIBALISM

posted by MrK @ 8:47 AM