Maravi

What a President!

What a President!
By The Post
Thu 13 May 2010, 04:30 CAT

THE fact that Rupiah is a committed tribalist is nothing new and it should not surprise anyone. Rupiah’s record of tribalism is well recorded and documented. What is unfortunate is that Rupiah has taken tribalism to a new level. We say this because there’s something to be gleaned from Paramount Chief Mpezeni’s complaint against Rupiah’s conduct.

It seems Rupiah’s tribalism has gone to such a level that he is now even attempting to discriminate people who cannot logically be discriminated. But this is what vice does. It perpetrates absurdities. Why should someone go to the extent of choosing a Chewa, a Nsenga, a Kunda as opposed to a Ngoni? Why should it matter that someone is a Chewa or a Ngoni? This is something that Rupiah needs to reflect on very carefully.

Our people have not forgotten that when campaigning for the presidency in 2008, Rupiah told the people of Eastern Province to chase all those who did not come from there and choose him because he was their son. Rupiah has gone to the extent of making disparaging statements against Tongas under the guise of attacking the United Party for National Development (UPND) president Hakainde Hichilema. Rupiah has made it very clear in his actions and sometimes in his words that tribe matters more than anything else in his decision-making processes.

Although Rupiah worked in Dr Kenneth Kaunda’s government, it seems he did not learn very much. Dr Kaunda realised the dangers that lay in allowing tribe and other ethnic diversities to divide our people. He tried everything to unite our people and reduce the potential frictions that could come from excessive emphasis on tribal differences. Dr Kaunda was determined to unite Zambia and tried to live according to the national motto of ‘One Zambia, One Nation’. Policies were crafted that looked meaningless and expensive to the untrained eye, all for the purpose of uniting the country.

Civil servants and other government officers who could be transferred were routinely moved around to experience life in other places and to reduce the impact of some of the colonial policies of divide and rule. It is not surprising to find a Bemba who speaks perfect Lozi because his or her father worked in the Western Province in their formative years.

The same is true about Lozis, Ngonis and other tribes. People were moved around and this had the effect of increasing understanding among our people. With this close contact amongst different tribal groupings, intermarriage was a logical conclusion and today we are raising a generation that is born out of such unions; a Lozi mother and a Ngoni father, a Kaonde father and a Bemba mother, a Tonga mother and a Tumbuka father. This was made possible by a leadership that deliberately set out to break the tribal barriers amongst our people.

The cancer of tribalism and its offshoots of nepotism, xenophobia and other illegitimate uses of tribal diversity is something that needs to be fought with vigour. If not fought, this cancer has the capacity to cripple our very existence as a nation. Worse still, it also has the capacity to give rise to a situation where a brother rises against another brother simply because of an artificial difference in tribe or language orientation.

But this is something that Rupiah does not seem to understand. He has been prepared to exploit tribal differences to advance his political interest. This is a dangerous approach, especially when such an approach is championed by a head of state.

The problem with using any form of discrimination as a basis for making serious decisions particularly when such discrimination is made insincerely is that you start finding ever-increasing reasons for discriminating.

This is what has happened in the Eastern Province. Now it is not only those who are from outside Eastern Province who should be chased as Rupiah demanded in 2008, but it is now anybody who does not share Rupiah’s preferred tribal affiliation. This is what happens when a person who is not prepared to be president takes on an important job. It seems Rupiah lacks the basic orientation that any successful leader needs to have.

To lead people, a leader needs to be committed to fairness. He or she needs to create an environment in which the competing interest of the people that they lead are adjudicated in a fair and transparent fashion. A leader must strive to create trust between himself or herself and the people that they lead.

This will help those being led to believe that the actions of their leader are motivated by a commitment to the common good. In other words, even if the people don’t agree with the leader, they are more likely to support him or her if they are convinced that he or she is committed to their best interest. This is something that seems to be lacking with Rupiah. There does not seem to be much trust that he is acting in the best interest of a country even from people that he is supposed to be very close with. In a way, this is what explains Mpezeni’s apparent frustration.

A leader must always be driven by integrity and clear principles of honesty. Thinking that our people are so cheap that they can be bought with some cheap rhetoric not accompanied by actions is to take the people for granted and Rupiah will pay for this. What is happening with Mpezeni is just a symptom of a much bigger problem. Rupiah has in a very short time managed to alienate a huge section of our society. Even the people that work with him seem to be driven more by fear than any true loyalty to him or what he stands for.

Indeed, what is it that Rupiah stands for, for which people must follow him with undivided loyalty and commitment? People want to follow something which is clear. They want to believe in their leaders. But Rupiah does not inspire any such reaction from our people. It is not very clear what principles he aspires to. Rupiah has been driven by blind lust for power for its own sake. He does not seem to realise that being a leader demands that he embodies and reflects the aspirations of our people.

This is why in his desperate attempt to maintain a hold on power, he has chosen to embrace the corrupt in the hope that they will help him retain control. He does not seem to realise that by embracing the corrupt and protecting them from facing the consequences of their acts, he has distanced the people from himself and lost the support of even those who thought he stood for something good.

There were those who thought that we were being too harsh when we predicted that Rupiah would embrace corruption and stand for nothing that could drive the country forward. They thought we were too hard when we said he was a tribalist who could embrace vice if he thought it could win him an election. But today the picture is very clear.

Many of our people have woken up to the rude shock of proving us right. We take no pleasure in this. We wish we were wrong because that is what will be in the interest of our people. If Rupiah turned out to be other than we thought he would be, our people would benefit. But Rupiah has not even tried to prove us wrong. His propensity for wrongdoing is boundless. What a President!

Labels: CHIEF MPEZENI, GEORGE MPOMBO, RUPIAH BANDA, TRIBALISM

posted by MrK @ 4:10 PM