Three years of HH and the UPND government feels like 10 years of pure burning hell!
By Azwell Banda,
The majority of Zambians are living in painful slow motion, towards nowhere apart from death.
It is grinding second after second of hunger and excruciating poverty, stretching into long minutes of sheer desperation which extend into long hours of mental stress. It is a moneyless life made very hopeless and dark by long hours of load shedding. For the majority, it is such that what should be a simple journey by road between Ndola and Lusaka requires the efforts to raise money for transport as if one is planning on flying to London: it is extremely expensive. And then, of course, there is no certainty one will arrive alive.
It would make for a very interesting Charles Dickens kind of novel, to record, vividly, the daily lived life of just one child in Zambia classified as a “junkie”, for say, just a week. If our public universities and their social science departments were properly funded and progressively run, it would be extremely interesting to read their research outputs on the impact of hunger on Zambia’s social fabric right now: Zambia has never, ever, been such a hungry country as we are today, thanks be to Hichilema’s economic mismanagement, incompetence and greed for foreign exchange. How many of us, today, are willing to give up a morsel of food so that the children of our neighbours with the undemocratic habit of popping up when we are about to eat, eat something also?
It is only now that Zesco is announcing plans to install diesel power generators in our major hospitals and clinics. Does Hakainde Hichilema and his friends in government care about the impact of erratic, long duration electricity load shedding on the thousands of Zambians countrywide whose health and lives depend on medical conditions which need electricity all the time? Do they know, understand, and feel the terror of death such patients suffer because of the erratic electricity loadshedding? How about a mother with a premature born baby in a rural health facility; does Hichilema and his band of political corrupt incompetents and thieves care about her and feel for her baby?
Hichilema’s government happily ignored and abandoned tonnes of medicines his government expensively imported to rot in a private warehouse, as millions of Zambians who depend on the public health system were given prescriptions in government health facilities, to buy the same drugs rotting in the warehouse. Meanwhile, millions of Zambians looking for work cannot find it; therefore, they have no money. Hakainde and his government have squeezed money out of the Zambian economy partly to cripple the Patriotic Front (PF) by squeezing businesses alleged to be aligned to the PF, and partly to satisfy the International Monetary Fund’s monetary policy prescriptions for Zambia.
Three years of the UPND government and the number of unemployed Zambians has exploded. A ticking time bomb is the explosive youth unemployment crisis, especially in our urban areas. Hichilema and his friends in government, who, when in the opposition promised Zambia’s young people massive quality and well-paying jobs and economic opportunities, today indirectly and directly accuse these desperate young people of being lazy, reliant on government, lacking in entrepreneurial acumen and skills, used to PF easy money and many such degrading moronic insults. And yet when in the opposition Hakainde signed a memorandum with Zambia’s youths, for mass provision of employment if elected into government.
Perhaps, paralysed with political trauma that their supposedly rich millionaire president has abandoned them by dumping all his electoral promises, Zambia’s young people, as unlike Nigerian and Kenyan young citizens, do not know what to do, other than pray and hope that “something will happen”. This political trauma has become a powerful barrier to all the opposition political parties: millions of young Zambians do not trust our politicians anymore. Their minds still saturated with the many lies Hakainde and his friends in the UPND fed them to cause them to vote for them, millions of young Zambians are confused, politically paralysed, and cannot see their way out of their current predicament, by supporting any of our current crop of opposition leaders and their political parties. The bottle, illicit drugs, cheap sex thrills, gambling and violent crimes beckon, for many of them.
It is the tired hopelessness of a father struggling with his heavy feet to walk back home after hustling in town the whole day, hungry, finding nothing, and therefore not looking forward to arrive home to his now hungrier family than when he left them in the morning which best captures the destruction of the place of a man and father in a typical Zambian family: the economic impotency of millions of Zambian males is fertile ground for domestic and gender-based violence. Millions of Zambian men cannot stomach the social and economic disrobement which hunger, unemployment and poverty use to rob them of their patriarchal status and place, in the family. Whenever Hichilema talks about “hard work” and “laziness” he rubs salt into the gaping wounds of such humiliated men.
Three years of Hichilema and the UPND government have exploded corruption in Zambia and imploded the Anti-Corruption Commission. We have become numb to the everyday revelations of massive theft, corruption and fraud in government. No month passes without a major story of massive theft, corruption and fraud in government breaking out, since August 24, 2021, when Hichilema was sworn as Zambia’s 7th Republican President. It is as if the floodgates of massive theft, corruption and fraud in government were flung wide open on the 24th of August, 2021. A thread passes through all the massive theft, corruption and fraud in government and leads straight to Hakainde Hichilema, as a person and as president of Zambia.
None of the promised constitutional, criminal justice, electoral and democratic reforms, serve for those his IMF masters have demanded, have happened. Instead, we have lived through a period of open desecration and violation of our Constitution, criminal rule with naked impunity, political vandalisation of the legislature, judiciary and the executive itself. No government in the post 1991 multiparty democracy era has treated all the opposition with so much open contempt as the UPND and Hichilema has done. They have extended this contempt to the Church, especially the Catholic Church: Batuke Imenda, secretary general of the UPND has called the Most Reverend Bishop Alick Banda “the Lucifer of Zambia”. More than a year now, both Hakainde Hichilema as president of the UPND and Batuke Imenda have not publicly apologised for this singularly offensive and dangerously divisive insult.
Three years down the line, it is now abundantly clear why the majority of Zambians rejected Hichilema and the UPND in 2006, 2008, 2011, 2015 and 2016: it is almost as if instinctively, intuitively, the majority of Zambians outside the UPND strongholds understood the dangers of a Hakainde and UPND government. In 2021, Hichilema was a beneficiary of the massive electoral backlash against Edgar Chagwa Lungu and his PF: a portion sufficient and necessary to remove the PF from office voted against the PF, in the PF strongholds, to punish the PF, and Hichilema was gifted these votes. Hichilema, therefore, has actually never convincingly won any election, on account of being nationally popular. It is this acute awareness which may cause Hichilema to inflict more constitutional vandalism on Zambia, as he plots to stay in power.
Three years in government and the true colours of Hichilema and his UPND are on full public display. Could some of the massive corruption and illicit transfers of money out of Zambia we are seeing be linked to the Bermuda offshore tax evasion schemes the Panama papers revealed about the behaviour of Hichilema when he was in the opposition? I don’t know. Hichilema’s penchant to profit off the auctioning of Zambia’s wealth is well known. The current flurry of selling state businesses perfectly fits Hichilema’s “dealer” mentality. The nationalisation of the losses of ZAMBEEF by government buying, exorbitantly, an unproductive farm from ZAMBEEF captures very well Hichilema’s cold, greedy, selfish and absolutely insensitive political personality to Zambia’s public welfare. Hichilema is happy to loot pension funds for his fake PPPs and raid Zambia’s government coffers to bail out his friends, but he cannot nationalise the mines and all Zambia’s natural wealth for the benefit of all the people of Zambia.
Of all the presidents Zambia has had, just under three years, Hichilema has already confirmed that he is the worst economic manager, insufferably corrupt, authoritarian, undemocratic, puppet of the West, pathological liar and a danger to our national unity and cohesion, as a 60-year-old republic. His selfish appetite to monopolise government business, raid the treasury and accrue debt are all out in the open. His narcissistic political character makes him impervious to advice and to collegial governance. He has the most chaotic and incompetent mob for a cabinet.
It has fast become clear to millions of Zambians that on 12th August 2021, Zambians unleashed upon themselves a selfish and arrogant political criminal outfit in the UPND and Hichilema, and unless they remove this gang from government, the majority of Zambians must expect to suffer hunger, diseases, unemployment and extreme poverty for many decades to come. The three years of the UPND and Hichilema in government have been pure hell, for the majority of Zambians.
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Three years of HH and the UPND government feels like 10 years of pure burning hell!
