Maravi

We’re sitting on a time bomb, warns Mpundu

We’re sitting on a time bomb, warns Mpundu
By Ernest Chanda
Sat 22 May 2010, 04:02 CAT

LUSAKA Catholic Archbishop Telesphore Mpundu has warned that there will be more violence in the run-up to 2011 general election because cadres have attained the status of militia. And Archbishop Mpundu has said the National Constitutional Conference (NCC) has mutilated the core content of the Mung’omba draft constitution.

In an interview, Archbishop Mpundu said the levels of intolerance exhibited so far could blow the country into flames if cadres are not caged through legal instruments.

“In 1991, the so-called ‘New Political Dispensation’ was announced with flair and fanfare but this ‘New wine’ of plural politics to this day is contained in ‘Old Wineskins’ and no amount of recycling has produced the desired results” Archbishop Mpundu said. “Political intolerance and downright hooliganism is the order of the day. Consequently the cadres have resurfaced with a vengeance.

These cadres have attained the status of militias capable of defying the law and daring the law enforcers by ferrying their members to any part of the country to carry out their evil mission of terrorising and bullying helpless citizens.

“If the just-ended Mufumbwe by-election is anything to go by, the nation has just been treated to a dress rehearsal of the drama that is sure to unfold on the Zambian political stage in the run-up to next year’s elections. The police, ill-trained, ill-equipped, despondent, unmotivated, outnumbered and encumbered by blatant political interference are ill-prepared to protect the public. They can only sit and watch powerlessly the tragedy waiting to unfold right in front of their very eyes and those of the entire nation. This scenario does not augur well for the public’s confidence in the Police Service to protect them and is sure to drive people to seek refuge in their own ‘defence strategies’.”

Archbishop Mpundu said the violence experienced in the Mufumbwe by-election was a national shame that deserved an investigation.

“The so-called ‘peaceful Zambia’ is in fact a tinderbox that can go up in flames any time unless these outlaws called cadres are effectively reigned in and caged through legal instruments. In the Mufumbwe by-election fiasco, innocent citizens have been brutalised and several people have been killed but the authorities don’t see this disaster as serious enough to warrant a speedy inquiry by an independent and professional body in view of bringing the culprits to book and delivering justice to the affected people and bereaved families,” Archbishop Mpundu said. “In civilised nations heads of the relevant government wings responsible for security, law and order would have rolled and resignations demanded by the citizens and tendered. Such decency doesn’t exist in ‘Peace loving Zambia’! The Mufumbwe by-election fiasco is a national shame!”
Archbishop Mpundu said if people lived in fear for too long, they were bound to react and that could lead to civil disobedience.

“From January to March 2002, tension was palpable in this country in the wake of the December 2001 disputed elections and the subsequent electoral petitions. There was tension again in the aftermath of the 2006 elections and some people were killed. Tension was dangerously much higher after the 2008 presidential by-election. We are sitting on a time bomb unless the cadres are outlawed and disbanded and the much needed and long overdue electoral reforms are effected before next year’s elections. Kenya is a very good lesson for us to learn from and those who think that the Zambian people’s patience and love for peace are limitless are burying their heads in the sand ostrich-like. Fear is a very potent emotion. People’s fear of political violence, fear of threats from the political elite who threaten them with unspecified reprisals before, during and after elections can ignite the already explosive situation that would make the post election violence in Kenya appear like a Sunday morning picnic.”

And Archbishop Mpundu has said Zambia may never achieve anything on constitutional reforms because of selfishness from successive regimes.

“On constitutional reforms, the truth is that since Zambia’s independence nearly 46 years ago, successive regimes have not really been interested in a people-driven constitution but in a document that gives the government of the day an easy means to hold on to power,” he said. “The administration that assumed power after the 2001 elections had made it very clear during the campaign that constitutional review was not on the list of its priorities.

Public pressure, however, forced the administration to change its stance and the Mung’omba CRC Constitution Review Commission was appointed.

Unfortunately, the administration hijacked the roadmap, the process and in the end even the core content of the Mung’omba CRC Draft Constitution has been mutilated by the NCC.

“The Church Mother Bodies’ decision not to take part in the NCC has been more than vindicated. After so much time and enormous financial and other resources expended, we are back to where we were in 1991, namely still in the ‘Dark Age’ of our political history, only that the ‘Dark Age’ is much darker this time around. The truth that will free us is that each successive government views the Constitution as its way of holding on or retaining political power instead of regarding it as the most important if not the only tool to engender genuine and sustainable social, economic and political development. The meaning of the experience is that successive regimes including the present one seek to erode our liberties in every way possible. What has obtained at the NCC will no doubt produce a voluminous document purporting to be a new Constitution but in fact it is one from which the soul has been sucked out and its spirit smothered by politicians colluding with unpatriotic citizens.”

Labels: CADRES, POLITICAL VIOLENCE, TELESPHORE MPUNDU

posted by MrK @ 4:17 PM