The time to act is now!

The time to act is now!
Written by Editor

Diplomats like Bill Nolan who wholeheartedly try their very best to help our country move forward in all areas of human endeavour deserve our respect.Nolan was more than a diplomat to our country; he had become a brother and a friend of our people.

He cared about even the smallest things affecting this country. We thank him for the time he was here and the effort he exerted in his duties to our country. And we give him our most humble thanks. For this reason, we urge all our people, especially our politicians and public servants, to take his advice very seriously.

Nolan yesterday advised our politicians and public servants who carry out their tasks and discharge their responsibilities conscientiously on behalf of the public to have nothing to fear from a free press or a critical civil society. And we are quite sure that most people try to do their jobs as best as they can, even if the result is not always entirely successful. He who has never failed to reach perfection has a right to be the harshest critic. There can be no doubt, of course, that criticism is good for people and institutions that are part of public life.

As we have stated before, no institution should expect to be free from the scrutiny of those who give it their loyalty and support, not to mention those who don’t. But we are all part of the fabric of our national society and that scrutiny, by one part of another, can be just as effective if it is made with understanding and accepted in the same way – with understanding. This approach can also act, and should do so, as an effective engine for change in our country.

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.

And we should start by recognising the scale of our problems. Our country is not flourishing. The enormous creative and spiritual potential of our nation is not being used sensibly.

But all this is still not the main problem our country is facing today. The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We have become morally ill because we have become used to saying something different from what we think. We have learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility or forgiveness seem to have lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us, they seem to represent only psychological peculiarities, or they resemble gone-astray greetings from the Kaunda days.

When we talk about a contaminated moral atmosphere, we are not just talking about the politicians and public servants. We are talking about all of us. We seem to be stuck to ways of the intolerant one party political system and we seem to have accepted it as something unchangeable and thus, we are today helping to perpetrate some of its intolerant practices. In other words, we are all – though naturally to differing extents – responsible for the intolerant practices that we are seeing in our country today; none of us is just its victim: we are all also its co-creators. We say this because every time we tolerate injustice, we tolerate intolerance, we are actually abetting and encouraging it.

And we have to accept this as a sin we are committing against ourselves. By accepting it as such, we will understand that it is up to us all, and up to us only, to do something about it. We can’t blame everything on others, not only because it would be unfair but also because it could blunt the duty that each one of us faces today, namely, the obligation to act independently, freely, reasonably and quickly whenever an injustice is committed.

Let us not be mistaken: the best government in the world, the best parliament and the best president, cannot achieve much on their own. And it would also be wrong to expect a general remedy from them only. We say this because democracy includes the participation and therefore responsibility from us all.

If we realise this, hope will return to our hearts. And in our efforts to rectify matters of common concern, we have something to lean on. For us at The Post, the last few weeks have shown us the enormous human, moral and spiritual potential and civic culture that slumbered in our nation under the enforced mask of apathy. We have learnt that society is a very mysterious creature and it is not wise to trust only the face it presents to you.

To move forward as a nation, we need to try in a new time and in a new way to restore the concept of morality to our politics. We need to teach ourselves and each other that politics should be an expression of a desire to serve, to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community. We need to teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if this means the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic manoeuvring, but the art of the impossible – the art of improving ourselves and our country.

We seem to have allowed the skirmishes for power to make us lose our souls, honour and dignity. We should not allow the desire to serve oneself to bloom under the fair mask of the desire to serve the common good. It is not really important who is in State House. The important thing is that the best of us, in the moral, civic, political sense should lead. We say this because the policies and prestige of our state depends on the personalities of those we have in power.

As Nolan correctly observed, we have some of the ingredients we need to make Zambia a better country for all of us. We have a Constitution which we are trying to perfect or improve; we have a parliament and what one can say robust party politics; we also have the judiciary and other oversight bodies. But these guarantee us nothing. They offer us instead the opportunity to succeed as well as the risk of failure. These institutions are simply a promise and a challenge to us. We say a promise because as free human beings, working together, we can govern ourselves in a manner that will serve our aspirations for personal freedom, economic opportunity and social justice. We say it is a challenge because the success of our democratic enterprise rests squarely upon our shoulders as citizens of this country and on no one else. For this reason, every one of us must share in the benefits and in the burdens of our country. And if or when we fail to achieve the standards we have set for ourselves, we should blame nobody but ourselves; we must take responsibility for the fate of our country. In the end, we get the government we deserve.

What is happening in our country today calls for the involvement of all of us in ensuring that a small group of our fellow citizens do not start to run the affairs of the country like it is theirs alone to enjoy; as if democracy in this country begins and ends with elections – after elections, those elected can do as they please. Building this country into a prosperous, just, fair and humane society calls for eternal vigilance from every one of us. Abuse of public resources, intolerance and other injustices against the people should not be tolerated even for a day because if they are, their roots will go deeper very quickly and uprooting them will be difficult and costly. The time to act is now!