Maravi

Dig a well before you are thirsty

Dig a well before you are thirsty
By Editor
Thu 10 June 2010, 09:20 CAT

It is clear that the police has been turned into a tool for Rupiah Banda to use against his political enemies and competitors, real or perceived. But as we have stated before, a leader who relies on the police to silence and reduce the influence of his political competitors is bound to come to grief.

There is no doubt that our police today is at the political service of Rupiah. This can be seen in the case of George Mpombo. The sole intention of that case is to politically cripple or incapacitate Mpombo or blackmail him into silence.

And the summoning of Ng’andu Magande by the police yesterday in a matter that has no basis for them to do so is simply an extension of this same practice. All those Rupiah thinks will challenge him for the MMD presidency and candidature in next year’s election are being subjected to legal harassment.

There is an attempt to secure criminal convictions against them. With a police that is led by a man like Francis Kabonde who is so unprofessional, Rupiah’s political opponents are increasingly finding themselves being prosecuted for all sorts of dubious offences. The judicial process is totally being abused to fix political opponents. And this reminds us what Simon Bolivar once said: “In absolute systems, the central power is unlimited. The will of the despot is the supreme law, arbitrarily enforced by subordinates who take part in the organised oppression in proportion to the authority that they wield.”

This will be difficult to accept by many people in our country because at the bottom of the heart of every human being, from the earliest infancy until the tomb, there is something that goes on indomitably expecting – in the teeth of all the crimes committed, suffered and witnessed – that good and not evil will be done to him. It is that above all that is sacred in every human being. But where are we headed? Where are we going to end with this type of political behaviour? Probably in hell! But what is hell? As Howard Fast had observed, hell begins when the simple and necessary acts of life become monstrous, and this knowledge has been shared through all the ages by those who taste the hell men make on earth. Now it is frightful to walk, to breathe, to see, to think.

When one looks at what is happening, one wonders what type if people are governing our country. What is their calibre? In answering this question, we turn to Count Oxenstierna, a seventeenth-century Swedish diplomat, who said: “Go forth, my son, and learn with how little wisdom the world is governed.” It is really low thinking for one to think that they can govern this country like a police state. What is going on is shameful. But as Albert Einstein correctly put it, “if most of us are ashamed of shoddy clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shoddy ideas and shoddy philosophies”.

It’s unwise to keep quiet in the face of all these injustices. Yesterday it was Mpombo, today it is Magande, tomorrow it may be you. Know that, as a Chinese proverb says, it is better to “dig a well before you are thirsty”. And those who are incapable of fighting for others will not be able to fight for themselves when their tribulations set in. It will not pay to keep quiet when things are going wrong just because it is not you who is directly affected. It is said that fools live to regret their words, wise men live to regret their silence. And as Herodotus wisely observed, it is better by noble boldness to run the risk of being subject to half of the evils we anticipate than to remain in cowardly listlessness for fear of what may happen.

But it seems Rupiah and his friends don’t learn from history. All tyrants know that it is safer to kill political opponents than to imprison them. Times change, and new situations open the strongest prison gates.

Whenever we hear a man express hatred for another, we wonder just what it is in themselves they hate so much. You can always be sure of this: you cannot express hatred for anything or anybody unless you make use of the supply of hatred within yourself. The only hatred you can express is your own personal possession. To hate is to be enslaved by evil.

The repression, harassment and mistreatment that we are seeing coming from Rupiah and hi s friends is teaching us something very valuable: that in life you encounter terrible events , but if you can hold on to your values, you can survive to be the better for it. It is said that he who has a why to live for can bear almost anyhow. And it is also said that men can live without justice, and generally must, but they cannot live without hope. We were taught that God made all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil.

And we do not error because truth is difficult to see. It is visible at a glance. We error because this is more comfortable. It is not that Rupiah and his friends don’t know that what they are doing is wrong, is not right. They know very well that their practices are wrong. But they do what they are doing because it’s beneficial to them; they do it out of vanity, greed and selfishness. This is the attitude we have to contend with. And as Paul Gallico observed in The Lonely, “For you were a man only when you could be the things you were and face up to the truth without flinching or denying it. The truth was that in life on earth, there was no such thing as happiness without pain, victory without defeat. There were joy and enchantment and beauty to be garnered on the path, but at all times too, there were burdens to be borne.” And this can be well concluded with a declaration from Thomas Jefferson: “There is no truth existing which I fear, or would wish unknown to the whole world.”

It is in this light that we would like to look at the issue of Magande’s harassment by Rupiah using the police. Looking at all the facts, there is no good reason whatsoever for the police to justify their interrogation of Magande over a rice debt he was not part of in any contractual way. That is a pure case of a business deal by people known to Magande without him being involved in any way in their business contract. But Rupiah will stop at nothing in his attempts to humiliate Magande and others he considers to be political opponents using the police. And this is why many Zambians today are fed up with the conduct of Kabonde and want him out of the police. The person who should be prosecuted is actually Kabonde himself for his part in that deal involving presidential escort cars. And we can’t understand why Kabonde is still serving as the Police chief with that very serious corruption case hanging over his head. The man the police should be interrogating is Dr Solomon Musonda for that Serenje shooting incidence and not Magande.

Labels: FALSE ALLEGATIONS, GEORGE MPOMBO, MAGANDE

posted by MrK @ 4:08 PM