MINES MINISTER PAUL KABUSWE IS HAKAINDE HICHILEMA’S MOST USEFUL IDIOT!
By Azwell Banda,
Exactly a year and a month ago, on Friday the 27 of October 2023, I wrote on this column that mines minister Paul Kabuswe is Hakainde Hichilema’s most useful idiot.
Today, after how Paul Kabuswe has responded in and outside parliament over Hakainde Hichilema’s irregular, irresponsible, illegal, criminal and unconstitutional disposal of Zambian value in Mopani Copper Mines, I am afraid to confirm that Paul Kabuswe is actually also an idiot, not just Hichilema’s “useful idiot”; Kabuswe is just simply an idiot.
I struggled in my article on the 27th of October last year to try and “rationalise” our national “tolerance” for idiots in government such as Paul Kabuswe. I laboured to explain how colonialism hollowed out our humanity and capacity to fight to reclaim it, including by the cultural and religious genocide colonialism entailed. Only this explains why Hakainde and Kabuswe are still free and walking tall and proud, after insulting all Zambians by their lunatic explanation in parliament over their irregular, irresponsible, illegal, criminal and unconstitutional disposal of Zambian value in Mopani Copper Mines. There being nothing much I can say about Kabuswe and us Zambians, I find I simply must republish, in full, the article I wrote on the 27th of October last year. Paul Kabuswe features in the very last paragraphs.
“It is the fate of the majority of the colonial natives to be consigned to the periphery of both the colonial and post-colonial economy. This should not be too difficult to understand: the colonial division of labour and accumulation of wealth, systematically and structurally, places the native in an inferior position to the coloniser. In fact, what saves the colonial native from the original intent of colonialism to exterminate the native is the need by the coloniser of cheap labour for the coloniser’s farms, mines, factories and homes. It is only as a domestic worker, security guard, factory hand, farm and mine labourer that the coloniser has value for the colonial native.
In the colonial government, the native is only good and useful as an office and toilet cleaner, office orderly, and messenger. All superior jobs requiring even the most basic post primary education and skills are reserved for the white coloniser. This consciously designed division of labour, at a time when massive wealth is extracted from the lands and natural resources of the native is essential to sustain the massive flow of wealth to the coloniser’s country, thereby cementing the global division of labour, wealth and power, with the coloniser in a dominant position and the native in an inferior one.
The colonial Christian missionary ploughs and cultivates the mind of the native and ruthlessly cleans it of all native religions, which hence forth are relegated to the rank of “primitive superstitions” and “pagan” practices, while simultaneously planting the coloniser’s superstitions and pagan practices (“superstitions” and “pagan” precisely because being strange to the native, and having no relevance whatsoever in the lives of the natives, and clearly in a minority, the coloniser’s religion and practices are alien, pagan and superstitions to the natives, who have their own world view and religions). Divested of their gods and goddesses, the natives are denuded of any sense of belonging to the world, and rendered spiritually impotent in preparation for their eventual economic and political conquest, by the coloniser.
Systematically, while amassing great fortunes from their natural wealth and overabundant cheap manual labour, the coloniser consciously miseducates the natives to fit into the colonial division of labour and wealth accumulation, locally and globally, as inferior human beings. This is easily achieved by in fact investing as little as possible, in the education of the native, by the colonial government. The missionary school may be allowed to offer some advanced, but still inferior education, to the native. Thus, a life of spiritual inferiority and dependence, economic and political dispossession, oppression, domination and super exploitation of the native is guaranteed, as the massive natural wealth and cheap labour of the natives powers the growth and development of the coloniser’s country, cities, towns, villages and advanced industries.
The natives, in a very short space of time during colonialism, lose all that which thousands of years of independent economic, social, cultural and political existence had accumulated and developed in them, including their spirituality, languages, culture, wisdom and knowledge. They become a carbon or photocopy, of their colonial masters. And like all carbon or photocopies, they can never be the original copy! Henceforth, only a revolution can recover the humanity of the colonial native. Nothing said above is rocket science: it is simple history of colonialism and how colonialism manufactures a dependent, inferior and impoverished native fit only to serve the colonial master. In our case, this is how White Supremacy was inculcated in us, and African inferiority burnt into our collective psyche.
Of course, from the first contact with the coloniser, the native resists land, body and soul dispossession, oppression, domination and exploitation. But the odds are badly stacked against the native. The Bible, gun and manufactured goods of the coloniser do the trick for the coloniser: the native is defeated, sometimes with the able and very willing help of the natives’ kings and queens.
And then came the struggle for our “independence”. The natives, lucky to have acquired some religious and colonial education from missionaries, are quick to notice the discrepancy between what is contained in the Bible and how the coloniser treats the native. Having paved the way for colonisation, the missionary school, college and university suddenly also becomes the nursery school for the birth of natives’ freedom and independence fighters! This confirms the wisdom of the colonial government in depriving the colonial native of investments in native education: any “education”, to merit being anything resembling “education” must have some emancipatory content and import, no matter how little and mediocre this could be!
Deprived of a large educated urban colonial native population, we must celebrate our freedom fighters whose vision of our “independence” was ruthlessly and deviously limited to the economic, political, state and government forms of the coloniser. What else could they vision and create outside the little world the coloniser and the missionary allowed them to know? More importantly, it is now patently clear that our freedom fighters were no match to the scheming and plans hatched in London to perpetuate our colonial dependence, now through our “independence”, thus sustaining the colonial division of labour and wealth, and the superiority and inferiority relationship of the coloniser and the colonised. Our colonisers actually wrote for us our “independence constitution”, complete with its liberal filth.
By August 2021, we had tried liberal democracy, a one-party state, and then reverted to liberal democracy, now renamed “neo-liberalism”, and still the majority of the people of Zambia were suffering from, astonishingly, exquisite hunger. Zambia had now joined the ranks of four of the hungriest countries on earth. Poverty, also fuelled by mass unemployment inherited from our colonial days, still affected the majority of Zambians. Millions of Zambia’s children from poor urban and rural families could not be in school as the neoliberal prescriptions to remove government funding to education threw them back into the colonial days, when the native child was not judged worthy of education.
The UPND and Hakainde Hichilema were voted into government having presented themselves as economic geniuses, competent government managers and champions of “good governance”, democracy and defenders of our Constitution and “the rule of law”. Through their, let us just say thoroughly untrustworthy “Great Leader”, Hakainde Hichilema, the UPND told us they had solutions to our economic and social problems. Hakainde Hichilema was going to “fix” our problems and reduce the cost of living and doing business, create employment, especially youth employment, and fix our social services including education and health.
At the heart of our many now deadly economic, social and cultural crises, is the mess in our mining sector. Hakainde Hichilema proudly announced he not only had solutions to the painful and costly mess in our mining sector, but many foreign investors were waiting for him to become our President, for them to invest in our mining sector. Mining still connects us to the world, as it remains our largest foreign exchange earner. Our mineral wealth, to be extracted, still depends on foreign money, just as it was during the days of our formal colonialism. This perpetuates the unequal division of labour and wealth accumulation, between Zambians and foreigners, just as it was during our colonial days. Hakainde Hichilema, by his own admission, was in the opposition for 17 years, enough time for him to acquire a minimum of four PhDs in any field. Zambians expected high quality government decisions, efficient management in the national interest, and reversal of the painful, costly and disastrous chaos in our entire mining sector, not just copper mining.
After 59 years of independence, Zambia now has more than enough national capacity and experience to own, manage and add value to our mines, of all minerals. We now understand that our hunger and multifaceted poverty before and after independence has been because we have not fully owned, properly managed and developed value adding industries, for all our minerals. We understand colonialism was exactly about denying us all this. We expected the UPND to reverse this fundamental cause of our national hunger and poverty, in our favour. It has not happened, and, we are about to be robbed during a period of global energy revolutions involving our minerals.
Upon forming government, Hakainde Hichilema appointed Paul Kabuswe as his minister of mines and “minerals development”. In the past two years, Paul Kabuswe has proved a thousand times that he is an excellent “useful idiot” for Hakainde Hichilema and his friends, in government. Kabuswe is extremely weak, a liar, extremely inconsistent and has not demonstrated that he is politically in charge of our mining sector, any of it. If he was none of these things, Vedanta would not be resuming mining in Zambia, Glencore would be nowhere near any of our mines, two years down the line, we would not have the chaos reigning supreme in our entire mining sector.
So, why is Paul Kabuswe still minister of mines? Clearly, he is a very good political front for Hakainde Hichilema and foreign money, for concealing from the public everything important happening in the mining sector, under the UPND government. Only this explains, logically, why Hakainde works very well with, and needs, Kabuswe. One day, and perhaps very soon too, Zambians will come to learn everything, every detail in every deal, verbal or written, the UPND government has entered into, with foreign money, and who has benefited from these deals. Then Paul Kabuswe will experience what political “fronts” and “useful idiots” endure, once their masters are deposed, and they are exposed.
Two years of the UPND government, it is abundantly clear that Zambia is going nowhere but deeper under, with Hakainde Hichilema and his Zambian friends and foreign associates. Zambia awaits its genuine liberators, and true, complete independence.”
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MINES MINISTER PAUL KABUSWE IS HAKAINDE HICHILEMA’S MOST USEFUL IDIOT!
