Maravi

Attacking donors in defence of a lazo

Attacking donors in defence of a lazo
Written by Editor

Independence is a good thing – it is an important aspiration. Any normal human being wants to be independent. We all want to be able to do things for ourselves without relying on others for the most mundane tasks. To be independent, one has to be able to cater for their own needs and to provide the basic necessities in life.

Accountability is also an important attribute that everybody must possess, even independent nations. Independence does not mean the absence of accountability. This is something that Vernon Mwaanga who the other day attacked the British High Commissioner to Zambia Thomas Carter, seems to have deliberately ignored.

As Hakainde Hichilema has correctly observed, no one should accept the abuse of resources that they make available to somebody for their help. This is what is happening in our country today. Our leaders have abdicated their responsibility to provide basic infrastructure and services to our people and live in a perpetual posture of begging from the international community. While doing this, they also resist any demands for accountability. They want to beg on their own terms.

There is nothing wrong with receiving help on their own terms if those terms were meant to benefit the people. Demanding respect from the donors whilst refusing to be accountable and openly supporting corruption is wrong and does not make sense.

In our traditional setting, we understand these issues very well. A man who wants to be independent does not live on charity. He works to earn his own living and thus the respect of his society. A beggar on the other hand will rarely, if ever, command respect in their society. When people reach the age of independence, one of the early things that happen is that they leave the homestead where they were born and lived as dependants to chart their own destiny.

There is no shortcut to independence. We must work to safeguard our own independence. We need to earn the money that is needed to finance our activities as a nation. When we accept donor aid, we accept something else – we become accountable to those that give us aid. There is only one way to stop this – stop begging.

Even when we start financing our own budget without donor aid, our leaders will still be required to be accountable to our people. And the international community will still have a moral obligation to help our people and come to their defence when their leaders start to steal from them, when their leaders become lazos, kabolalas like Frederick Chiluba.

We cannot expect the world, especially those nations that have been very helpful to us, to stand by and watch a lazo like Chiluba steal public resources and go scot-free because his friends in power have manipulated the entire judicial process to get him off the hook. We cannot interpret the intervention by the international community in Rupiah Banda’s criminal connivance with Chiluba as imperialism. We know what imperialism is. We know that imperialism means the denial of political and economic rights and the perpetual subjugation of the people by a foreign power. We also know that imperialism has been weighed and found wanting. But this is different from chasing a thief and trying to apprehend him so that he is brought to justice. We all need the support of our neighbours when a lazo enters our property at night. And that’s why we shout loudly, “lazo, lazo, kabolala, kabolala…” so that our neighbours can wake up and come to our aid.

The international community is our neighbourhood and it has a moral obligation to help us when we are being robbed or we have been robbed. And indeed, the international community came to the aid of the country when Chiluba and his friends looted the treasury of our country. They helped us to make him accountable in whichever way they could. Chiluba was prosecuted in England and here at home. And in both instances, it was clearly established that he is a thief, a lazo. In England, Chiluba and his fellow lazos were ordered to pay back what they had stolen. Here in Zambia, there was connivance on Rupiah’s part to secure an acquittal for Chiluba that all the honest people in this country have seen through as fraudulent and corrupt and denounced in all sorts of ways.

We therefore cannot abuse the concept of national sovereignty to protect lazos, thieves and their thefts and deny the rest of our people justice by stopping them from getting the support they deserve from the international community.

When the British, the Americans, the Norwegians, the Swedes or any other diplomats talk against the theft of public resources and the official government policy of defending lazos, they are not interfering in our affairs. They are doing what normal bystanders should do. What would you say if somebody was being robbed and all the people around that person were watching without offering any help? We would all rightly say that those people who watched a person being robbed without offering any help, if they could, were evil and irresponsible. And who doesn’t like support from friends? Support from friends is always something which is a source of tremendous inspiration to everyone.

And this is why those of us who are ardent anti-imperialists believe that to be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the lives of our people, the lives of others. One who robs these people, one who steals his poor country’s resources can never claim to be an anti-imperialist, to be a defender of national sovereignty. Clearly, what these corrupt elements are defending is not our national sovereignty but their corrupt schemes. Of course we know that nationalism is a card that is always thrown by crooks and tyrants of all hues when they are challenged by humanity, by the international community to stop their abuses of their people and their resources. This is what Chiluba and his corrupt defenders are doing. This is what Vernon is trying to do.

Who doesn’t know Vernon’s record? Do we need to talk about it again? How many souls have Vernon destroyed with drugs in this country and this region? Can a true nationalist, patriot and an anti-imperialist do that to his own people and to humanity in general? The truth is whenever these characters are called upon to account for their misdeeds, their first line of defence is to smear the international community with the filth of imperialism. And their own people are accused of being foreign agents. No matter how self-created their problems are, they will eventually be blamed on the foreigners, on imperialism. There was no foreign government or official who had asked Chiluba to steal from the Zambian people. Chiluba did what he did because of greed and not because of being anti-imperialist.

He was not even a Robin Hood who stole from the rich to give to the poor, but Chiluba stole from the poor to share with some crooked rich people all over the world. The record of what we are saying is there to see. Just read the London High Court judgment and you will see how many rich people Chiluba shared the money he had stolen from the poor Zambian people with.

Chiluba’s behaviour was more imperialist than the people he is calling all sorts of names today. He did not care about our people. Even now, if you listen to Chiluba, he doesn’t talk about the people and their plight, their problems. It’s all about himself and his right to steal with impunity. Wherever Chiluba goes – be it at a church service or a funeral – all he talks about is himself and how his declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation protects him from responsibility for the thefts he engaged in. To him, the declaration of Zambia as a Christian nation is a magic chant similar to abracadabra which mysteriously cleans him of all moral responsibility for his many evil acts. This is incredible thinking. But this is what Chiluba is – an incredibly shameless thief. It is difficult to imagine how this extremely selfish and greedy individual managed to be at the helm of our country for 10 years.

It is difficult to imagine that someone with any amount of political experience can turn the defence and laundering of Chiluba’s corrupt image into official government policy. What good this is supposed to do for them is impossible to discern when thinking rationally. This is really what it means to allow Zambian politics to be relegated to trivialities, chosen precisely because they salve the consciences of the corrupt and powerful and conceal the plight of the poor and powerless. It’s really difficult to understand how any decent government can turn the defence of a criminal, a lazo who has unquestionably been found wanting into a government policy financed by the same poor taxpayers whose money he stole. This is why we call them charlatans – fake experts.

Calling donors names will not change the truth of what is on the ground. The donors have a moral duty to voice their misgivings on the abuse of their taxpayers’ resources by our irresponsible government.

Labels: HAKAINDE HICHILEMA, VERNON MWAANGA

posted by MrK @ 4:14 PM