Maravi

Self-centered characters cannot help our people

Self-centered characters cannot help our people
Written by Editor

What Rupiah Banda and his friends are doing is wrong. It is wrong to ignore the public and pursue narrow political interests in the way that Rupiah is going about issues. There are so many things going wrong in our country that we are sometimes at a loss to believe that so much destruction can happen in such a short time. But this is Rupiah.

It is easy to destroy but building is difficult. This is what we are seeing with Rupiah. In a period of just under a year, so many things have gone wrong that it is difficult to understand how someone can be so destructive.

It seems that almost nothing Rupiah does is innocent. There is always an undercurrent – a hidden agenda. This is not the way a president should run the affairs of the country. For Rupiah, even an issue as straightforward as going to attend the United Nations General Assembly becomes complicated. Where was he from the time he left Lusaka to the time he arrived in New York? Who was he meeting? Was it an official or private visit?

But this is the kind of president that we have. He does not seem to have sense of the duty that is upon him. Rupiah wants to live like a private citizen at our expense. They want to turn the presidency into a kantemba for their personal dealings.

Every citizen has a duty to think beyond his or her own interests. Civilisation demands that each one of us thinks about the impact of their actions or inaction on the rest of society. This is what the social contract that constitutes Zambia as a nation demands from us.

It is criminal for Rupiah and his friends to make decisions that are designed to safeguard their personal interests at the expense of the interests of our people. Rupiah should stop taking our people for granted. It will not do to continue ignoring the majority of our people.

As we said earlier, there are too many things happening. It is not possible that they are unconnected and unrelated. There are enough scandals and scams to fill volumes upon volumes of books. This is the kind of government that Rupiah is running.

There is a lot that brings Rupiah and Frederick Chiluba together. To start with, they both practice money politics. Rupiah has been known to boast that at the next election, they are going to have more money than they had in the last election. Rupiah does not say where he is going to get the money, but one thing is certain; he seems to know that they are going to have a lot of it.

We have all come to know fundraising for politics is a fertile ground for corruption and embezzlement of public funds. This is what has brought Chiluba to the point where he is now. In the name of raising money for politics, Chiluba and his tandem of thieves raided the national treasury. They committed financial atrocities on an unprecedented scale in the history of our country.

When Rupiah says, as he has done recently, that they are going to have a lot of money, warning bells must begin to ring.

Chiluba used money to bribe the electorate. He brought the ‘nichekelo culture’. Everybody seems to expect illicit payment for whatever they do; they want their cut – nicheleko! Our nation will take a very long time to recover from this political culture.

During the Chiluba era, we saw a lot of funny NGOs making all sorts of pronouncements favourable to Chiluba. We thought this had gone away with Chiluba. But under Rupiah, it is back with a vengeance.

It is not only about money that Rupiah and Chiluba seem to have similarities in the way they view politics and public service. But even the nature of scandals that have rocked their governments are similar. Their method of reacting to these scandals is also similar.

Chiluba used to say give me evidence when the public raised concerns about corruption. This was in situations where anybody could see that things were not as they should be.

For his part, Rupiah has decided that the best way to respond to the scandals that have rocked his government is to say repeatedly, even when the facts show something else, that they are fighting corruption. Rupiah sees no contradiction in embracing Chiluba and his corruption and theft of public funds on one side, and declaring his government’s intolerance for corruption.

Corruption and abuse of office embolden people. They begin to believe that they have full control and no one should question them. This is where Chiluba had reached. Rupiah sees no contradiction in praising Chiluba as a damn good president while calling for the scalps of junior Ministry of Health officials.

To Rupiah, it seems that hanging the junior officials is all it takes to prove that he is fighting corruption. Rupiah’s behaviour is openly, shamelessly and blatantly contradictory.

For instance, his government has continued to force through the appointment of RP Capital Partners as the sole financial advisors to the Zambia Development Agency on the proposed privatisation of Zamtel. Instead of requiring that the whole RP Capital and Zamtel affair be subjected to a full investigation, Rupiah has made sure that technocrats have been pushed to ratify wrong things.

They had to meet at night! Well, it would be too much to expect Rupiah to require a full investigation into the Zamtel saga when his son, Henry, is at the centre of it. Chiluba had similar transactions, some of whose details have only come to be known many years later. At the time that he was doing it, Chiluba was in control and thought that people would never know. But as the saying goes, you can run but you can’t hide.

As for Rupiah, our concern is that he is driving the country in reverse gear at high speed and not even bothering to look in the rear view mirror. He does not seem to care what he destroys in the process. It will not surprise us if our economy were to collapse lower than where it is now because of Rupiah’s recklessness. Who will benefit from this vicious cycle? Certainly not our people.

For those that have been in doubt about where Rupiah is leading our country, the time has come to wake up and accept what is clear before our eyes. This man is not going to work for our interests. He is there for himself and his family. We know that his family has an interest in the privatisation of Zamtel. We also know that his family had an interest in the National Airports Corporation radar contracts. We are watching a Chiluba-like presidency unfolding before our eyes. This would be funny if it was not tragic.

It is a tragedy that in the 21st century, we have a government that does not seem to care for its people. This is why Rupiah and Chiluba can form a political pact to fend for their interests and condemn millions of our people to poverty.

At his age, Rupiah should have been concerned about the future generations and the legacy that they will inherit from his presidency. But this is far away from Rupiah’s mind.

Everything about him tells us that he doesn’t care about anybody except himself and his own pleasures. This is why he shamelessly pursues personal pleasures at the expense of public responsibility. Again, this is something that we saw in Chiluba. Chiluba was an incredibly self-centered president.

He was all tactics and politics, no principles, no real concern for our people. Rupiah’s end will not be very different from Chiluba. A president who does not respect public interests is bound to abuse the immense power that the office brings. This is the pit into which Chiluba fell. From what we can see, this is the same pit into which Rupiah is diving with eyes open.

Our people have suffered enough. They need compassionate leadership. Selfish, self-centered characters cannot help our people. Our people deserve better.

Labels: CHILUBA, CORRUPTION, RUPIAH BANDA

posted by MrK @ 2:10 AM