Kunda’s ego trip to Barotseland
Kunda’s ego trip to BarotselandBy The Post
Sun 17 Apr. 2011, 04:00 CAT
In terms of credibility, George Kunda has very little, if not nothing, to show. In terms of lies, George leads.
We say this because this is a man who has wasted over K200 billion of tax payers’ money on a constitutional review process which amounted to nothing but a personal and shameful ego trip.
This is a man who is so intolerant that even in a matter as important as the formulation of the national constitution, he only wanted his voice to be heard and his wish to prevail.
He packed the National Constitutional Conference with people that could easily be manipulated.
Those who made the mistake of joining the process hoping that their reasonable positions would be accepted soon found out that the whole conference was about George’s wishes.
If George said something was good, it was accepted.
On the other hand, if George said something was not acceptable, it did not matter that such an issue was something that our people legitimately demanded, it was frustrated.
We can safely say that George belongs to a generation that has been reasonably well educated and exposed to a lot of knowledge.
With people like him in government, our people would have expected that our country was heading in the right direction. He came into government relatively young and fresh.
But George’s record is a shameful one. When we scan his history in government, we find it impossible to identify any meaningful attempts on his part to stand for what is right.
George is one of those individuals that have consistently defended what is wrong.
And sometimes George does so with outright lies.
A good example of this is his decision to grant Kashiwa Bulaya a nolle prosequi claiming there was no strong case against him.
This was a lie.
And George knew he was lying. He is a liar, a shameless liar.
We say this because Bulaya ended up being convicted not only by the subordinate courts, but also by the High Court on appeal.
This is George the liar, the manipulator, the greedy politician who does not care about our people.
George is a Machiavellian politician for whom the ends justify the means.
When one looks at him critically, he is probably the most dangerous politician we have known in a very long time. George’s methods bear some similarity with those of Frederick Chiluba.
We say this because one of the hallmarks of Chiluba’s political approach was that he always did what a normal person would not expect a person in his position to do.
In fact, predicting what Chiluba was going to do in a situation was not very difficult.
All one had to do was try to imagine what a dishonest and politically brutal person would do in the situation that Chiluba found himself in.
If you answered that question, you would probably know what he would do with a high measure of accuracy.
But in some ways, George even beats Chiluba on this score.
Whatever his faults, Chiluba used to be somewhat conscious of public opinion.
However brutal he became, Chiluba kept his eye on the demands of the people.
In this way, he was a thinking politician.
Maybe Chiluba’s many years in trade union politics had taught him that it did not matter how powerful you were, at the end of the day you had to take care of the interests of the people to survive.
This explains his unlikely choice of Levy Mwanawasa as a successor. Chiluba knew that he needed somebody who was somewhat removed from him to convince the people that he was leaving power.
Anyway, the point we are making is George lacks this kind of self-limitation.
He is a politician who does what he wants regardless of what the consequences are.
When George does things, one is left wondering what is wrong with him.
He is a lawyer but is he intelligent, is he wise? He may be intelligent, but he is certainly not wise.
This is why even his visit to Western Province for the Kuomboka ceremony is a disaster. George has gone into a place where people are angry.
They have got legitimate grievances about the way that his government has dealt with them.
A wise leader would go into that environment with a measure of humility, self-restraint, self-limitation, modesty, reconciliatory and clothe himself in a cloak of remorse about the tragedies that his government has unleashed on Western Province.
But George has no time for such niceties. To him, that is a time to start attacking people who are not there to defend themselves.
To him, it is appropriate to start discussing homosexuality.
With all that has happened in Western Province, George finds the courage to discuss homosexuality. He may not like Michael Sata.
But Sata has some supporters there who appreciate the fact that he has spoken for them when many political leaders could not find the voice to discuss the Barotse problem.
Is he saying that those people in Barotseland who are supporting Sata are supporting him because of homosexuality? What is the relevance of this stupid discussion?
That is why we say George has no wisdom, he is not wise.
Here is a Vice-President who goes into a house of mourning where grief, sadness and probably anger are the most pronounced emotions that people are feeling and yet he has no word to say to them that pacifies that anger.
Instead of addressing their grievances, George uses the opportunity to play cheap politics, attacking people who have nothing to do with the problems Barotseland is today facing.
Neither The Post nor Sata had anything to do with the confusion that rocked Mongu and ended in the deaths and injuries of so many people at the hands of George’s government.
It is George and his government that have everything to do with these deaths and injuries, not The Post or Sata.
The way George is talking is doing nothing to improve the battered image of his government in Barotseland.
What George is doing is insulting the intelligence of the people of Barotseland.
It is as though our brothers and sisters in Barotseland do not really know what their problems are.
And George wants them to believe that it is The Post, Sata and some Catholic priests that are causing their problems.
It is not the first time that George has had a grand opportunity to deal with his government’s mistakes over the Barotse issue and decided to squander it.
Not too long ago, our Parliament demanded an explanation about the deaths and injuries that occurred during the January 14 Barotse disturbances.
If George was a wise and honest politician, that was an opportunity to rise above petty politics and deal with the injury felt by the people of Barotseland. But what did George do?
His behaviour was nothing short of insulting to the people of Barotseland.
George had even the courage to tell lies about the dead, claiming they were about to destroy petrol stations and commit all sorts of crimes.
They are not there to defend themselves, but there are people who were there.
Most of these people who have lost their legs today and others who are nursing serious injuries were shot at in places that had nothing to do with rioting.
George’s government picked up people in their homes at night, claiming they were rioting. Rioting! Where? In their beds! Only a diseased mind can defend such injustice.
People were arrested from Mongu, brought to Lusaka and charged with treason.
George is not only the Vice-President of the Republic.
He is also the Minister of Justice and the man effectively in charge of our entire judicial process.
These people he arrested and detained were subjected to a lot of torment and anguish. But in the end, they were just charged with riotous behaviour for which, as we write today, most of them have already been acquitted. This in itself shows that George lied about them having committed the crimes for which they were arrested and charged. Here again, the liar is not The Post but George himself and his government.
George should know that attacking The Post and smearing it with all sorts of filth will not take away the problem that his government has in Western Province.
They have killed people, they have maimed people, they have humiliated people and attacking The Post will not change this fact.
They need to deal with the temerity of their own actions. They need to face their own folly. If they do not know that the people of Western Province are angry, then their problems are much bigger than anyone can help them to understand.
People have lost life and limb but all George can think about is how to gain political mileage.
It is shameful that today he wants to associate himself with the people of Barotseland. It is embarrassing to hear him trying to use his wife’s ethnic extraction to improve his political standing in Barotseland.
If he felt that he was that close to the people of Barotseland and their traditions, why has he not championed those causes in government?
Why is he failing to speak honestly about what the problem is today? We do not expect our politicians to have all the answers for all the problems that our country faces.
But we expect them to be honest about what those problems are.
Trying to flatter the Lozis using his wife will not bring back the innocent lives that his reckless government has taken; it will not put back those amputated legs and mend the scars of those ripped bellies.
And George saying that he is excited about attending Kuomboka just shows how insensitive and out of touch he is. This is probably the saddest Kuomboka in living memory.
People are in mourning. They feel humiliated. But George is excited. Excited about what?
Anyway, if he associates himself with the traditions of the Lozis on account of his wife, why has it taken him so long to go to Kuomboka?
George has been in government for almost 10 years and this is his first time to attend the Kuomboka he so much loves!
And moreover, George is in his mid 50s and he has lived all his life in this country and he has never attended a single Kuomboka for all these years he has spent with his Lozi wife!
It had to take Rupiah to order him to go because he was too scared to go himself.
George is at Kuomboka because he has no choice.
George and his boss know what they have done.
Even the Kufuluhela he says he attended, it was by coincidence; he had gone to Mongu to campaign in the Luena by-elections which they lost.
George should learn to treat the feelings of the people that he claims to lead with respect.
His behaviour over the Barotse issue is nothing short of shameful.
Labels: GEORGE KUNDA, NCC, WESTERN PROVINCE
posted by MrK @ 2:55 PM
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