My belated tribute to this great statesman and scholar is rooted in what I consider to be his immense contribution to this country's march into the future. His writings have left an enduring legacy which time and the elements will not destroy.
e was a man who had spent his life in great work, absorbing him to a degree few can match and with a sense of gaiety which made him the friend of all who were privileged to know him, a man who never allowed the dark clouds of human destiny to overawe him and to quench his practical sense of decency and his zeal for human betterment. He saw life as a whole, all of it was to be cherished if no part was to suffer.
Unlike the 'men and women without art' who dominate our institutions and who are in a hurry to accumulate wealth without sweating for it, Mwanakatwe sought no distinctions, titles and recognition by the powers-that-be but remained strong enough to be himself, polished and well-rounded, to tend to the golden mean with the aim to bring justice, hope and opportunity of self-direction to his fellow citizens burdened by the evils of an unjust distribution of the common weal.
And as I pray to God and the ancestral spirits to bring him his earned rewards, I remain unshaken in the belief that, when about four months ago Fate's urn shook and the lot came leaping out, John Mwanakatwe's soul set sail in the breezy and glowing sunset for his last journey to the other shore of the Styx, firmly fixed his gaze upon the bright stars and never looked back. He had fought the good fight.
Mwanakatwe wrote three books titled Growth of Education in Zambia Since Independence (Oxford University Press,1968), End of Kaunda Era (Multimedia Zambia, 1994), and Teacher, Politician, Lawyer (Bookworld, 2003).
It was said during the church service that he was working on a fourth book focusing on legal matters in Zambia. The books we have are well written by a man who had both appropriate technical qualifications and hands-on-experience as well as a passionate devotion to rigorous scholarship and literary elegance.
Personally, I would urge Multimedia publishers or those currently holding the copyright to re-print End of Kaunda Era which should become compulsory reading in our schools.
Indeed, as we stand today, Zambia is a literary and scientific desert. Our institutions of higher learning have produced very few books of value to the wider society. Notable exceptions may be in the legal, mining and media fields. It would appear that our dons and lecturers have gone fishing when the motto in academia around the world remains: 'publish or perish'.
At the socio-political level, few people have come forward with a patriotic willingness to commit down to paper their reminiscences, records, analyses and perceptions of the nascent State and formation of the Zambian polity. They are thus depriving the younger and future generations of crucial elements that would combine to provide a historical trail as seen through indigenous eyes.
Besides Mwanakatwe's book concerning education, mention must be made of Henry F. Makulu's titled Education, Development and Nation Building in Independent Africa- A Study of New Trends and Philosophy of Education (London, SCM Press, 1971), which would make useful reading because of its all-round approach to the issue. It would be a valuable addition to any serious private library.
Without necessarily giving exhaustive publishing titles and details, I attempt below to give pell-mell a representative but by no means complete list of freedom fighters, pioneering authors and leaders who have striven to enrich our collective memory for a better understanding of our society, national identity, successes and failures. These are Dr Kenneth Kaunda (A Humanist in Africa; Zambia Shall Be Free; Letter to My Children; Kaunda on Violence); Kapasa Makasa (Zambia's March to Political Freedom); Kapelwa Musonda; Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe (in Bemba, We Can Forgive But We Cannot Forget); Wittington Sikalumbi (Before UNIP); Sikota Wina (A Night Without A President); Malama Sokoni and Temple, M.
(Kaunda of Zambia); Stephen Mpashi (Betty Kaunda); Vernon J. Mwaanga (An Extraordinary Life; The Other Society: A Detainee's Diary); Andrew Sardanis; Simon Zukas (Into Exile and Back); Harry M.Nkumbula (A Biography of the Old Lion of Zambia by G. Mwangilwa); Levy P. Mwanawasa: An Incentive for Posterity by Amos Malupenga); F.T.Chiluba and Grey Zulu.
Last but not least, Henry S. Mebeelo (Reaction to Colonialism, MUP, 1971); Beatwell S. Chisala (The Downfall of President Kaunda); William Simukwasa (Coup!, ZEPH, 1979); Frorence Nyondo (The Cold Hand of Death, MMZ, 1982) and E. Milingo (The Demarcations; The World in Between).
On the promotion and distribution side, it is perhaps indicative of an entrenched woolly-minded approach to local literature that most of our bookshops lamentably fail to give pride of place to Zambian authors in general, thus keeping potential readers at bay and under the perennial thumb and spell of foreign pundits and rose water books.
Zambia is ultimately the loser as the wisdom embedded in its peoples and their collective culture, its soil and artifacts, oral and aural memories, remains un-nourished and stunted at the expense of contemporary communities and upcoming generations.
We are thus groping in a thick fog and looking for an elusive light at the end of the tunnel because those who happen to call themselves leaders or experts in this or that do not appear to be in pursuit of a larger idea, a national ideal that can radically transform our society. Our revered intellectuals in positions of power or in temples of knowledge constantly keep confusing optimism about the future of the country with asinity.
They intone snappy platitudes with a longing eye and a fatal envy on the malodorous fruits naturally flowing from the patrimonial state when they do not simply decide to become for a few pieces of silver the infamous 'useful idiots - that Lenin so scornfully reviled - in the service of tyrannical and morally bankrupt regimes where protagonists do not appear to keep alive in their breast 'that little spark of celestial fire, called conscience'.
I am of course mindful of the fact that human behaviour is goal- oriented often on the downside of life in the sense that the goal solely becomes gratification oriented and seeks at all cost deprivation avoidance. But there is a truth that cannot be contradicted: Man is here for the sake of other men.
In this regard, Albert Einstein confessed: many times a day I realise how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labours of my fellow men, both living and dead, in order to give in return as much as I have received. In the same vein, Tom Paine exclaimed: my country is the world and my religion is to do good. It seems to me that Africans in general and Zambians in particular seek to chart a course of development, progress and happiness devoid of any societal ethic.
In the Europe of the Enlightenment, the potential for abuse was until the last century circumscribed by the Judeo-Christian ethic of society at large whereas in China the seeds of Stalinism were tampered by the persistence of Confucian teachings. We in Africa must earnestly try to discover some inner strength and communal guidance in the positive values of our cultural heritage.
Evidently, the bottom line is that if we are not clear whence we have come, we lack an essential parameter in determining where we need to go, placing ourselves out of the moving train of history. We are as a result trapped in acts and ideas which herald a messy march towards the bounties of world civilization and a better quality of life.
The Education Front
It is said that people who do not remember their past or refuse to learn from the lessons of history are doomed to repeating the same mistakes. In this regard, didactic books, particularly those crafted by the minds and hearts of people involved in our nation's struggles for self - preservation, are as indispensable as mother's milk in tackling the problems of under - development because they empower our people to participate in a worldwide process of exploiting scientific and recorded knowledge towards an endogenous form of development.
Indeed, homegrown books do greatly assist in the process of conscientisation so dear to Paulo Freire and other radical thinkers because they throw a flood of illuminating insights on where we stand and need to go. By clarifying the past and shaping the present, they help us to formulate safeguards and goals we need to focus on in order to avoid the pitfalls of mass political, intellectual and economic suicide.
Therefore, our institutions of learning, especially at the tertiary, level need to engage more in dispensing the kind of holistic knowledge found in human, environmental and natural sciences.
Presently, more attention seems to be given to basic sciences , economics, business, marketing and other white-collar courses in a country that has been incapable of increasing its employment levels of 400,000 formal job opportunities since independence.
This bias has tended to produce 'one-dimensional' minds and scientists unable to innovate and design proudly Zambian products or equipment. In Zambia almost everything is imported with harmful consequences to our foreign reserves.
In the building industry for instance, our architecture and urban planning when they exist at all have long lapsed into squalid exercises of bleak, dysfunctional structures of undefined geometry.
We see the erection of a parade of shops and prefabricated malls so dishearteningly ugly that one would want to weep at every encounter and seek out the perpetrators and city officials involved and make them confess their sins on a football green. We need, as a nation, not only bright but daring and long-range minds as well which are truly a mark of genius and love of country.
In a fast changing world where only the fittest can survive as indicated by Darwin's controversial theories of evolution, no respectable nation can afford to leave more than half of its population unschooled and behind.
An educated population is a sure foundation for national reconstruction and economic development.. This occurs only when people have developed sufficient political awareness and are able to foster non-dependent forms of consciousness and self- organisation in relation to their natural and social environments.
The story is told of a Harvard professor addressing the latest intake of undergraduates and announcing that half of everything taught them over the next three years would be wrong. After waiting for the laughter to die down, he looked intently at his audience and with a twinkle in his eye he declared: your job while you are here is to find out which half. He reportedly left the platform to loud applause.
In the view of the classical economists, education develops not only aptitudes but also attitudes conducive to economic well being. Indeed, Alfred Marshall, the author in 1890 of 'Principles of Economics' vigorously defended the idea that the most valuable form of capital is that invested in human beings, while Karl Marx saw it as a way of combating the alienation of man from his own economic activities which the division of labour under capitalism had brought about.
It is therefore a matter of great concern when the UNZA Chancellor was reported early this year as having said that those having college education represent only about two per cent of the population of Zambia. If accurate, these statistics point to incredibly low levels of investments over the last forty years and inevitably confirm the following outcomes in the medium and long term:
- The country will not be able to attain the MDGs nor significantly bridge in the next 20 years the gap between a minority of rich individuals and the majority of people living in misery;
- Per capita income and national GDP can only rise to benefit more than fifty percent of the population if the economy grows at about 8 to 10 percent per year for the next 20 years.
- The vision of middle-income country by 2030 has no basis in fact. Zambia cannot jump, leapfrog or catch up in development because education does not jump. Moreover the service and production sectors in manufacture and industry as well as the energy and transport sectors will remain constrained and critically weak in the foreseeable future to support any serious and sustainable economic take-off.
On the other hand, our youth by and large appears to be on a roller-coaster plunging from a cliff into the sea because they lack credible local role models and are confronted by the depravity of an unequal and iniquitous society in which deceitful and lying officials proclaim that property is not theft but forget to add that in their beautiful Zambia a good deal of theft becomes property.
Moreover, government and its legislative and judicial wings have become inseparable. In the words of George E. Reedy in The Twilight of the Presidency, the entire structure has become a hallowed shrine where mediocrity, the lust for power can be sanctified and the dullest wit is greeted with reverential awe and sold to the public as brilliant, compassionate and dedicated to everyone's happiness.
The young and not so young are thus embroiled with reckless abandon in sniffing the opium of mass culture in a copy-cat society craving for superficial western lifestyles as a sign of being cultured at the expense of ancestral wisdoms and the concepts of the African personality and Negritude propounded by Kwame Nkrumah and Leopold S. Senghor respectively.
This alienation is exacerbated by the gradual and irreparable loss of our indigenous languages and the tendency by our politicians and captured media outfits to reduce culture to some kinds of vulgar folklore shows.
This disposition tends to give to credence to what the supremacist Prof Hugh Trevor-Roper called 'the unrewarding gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.'
Indubitably, the stakes are high. And ghastly are the consequences of failure to chart a new developmental path grounded in serious public debates all over the country in order to map out the general shape and direction of our priorities and societal goals. It is already too late in the day for a new consciousness to be born from the womb of the old system which has shown its limitations to lead and displayed an ever-expanding propensity to enrich its servants, epigones and family.
These challenges are not unique to Zambia or other developed countries. In August 1996, Newt Gingrich, then US House Speaker, had sternly warned that no nation can survive with 12-year-olds definitely dropping out of school and having babies, 14-year-olds doing drugs, 17-year-olds dying of AIDS and 18 year olds receiving certificates they cannot even read.
Clearly, the capacity for self-deprecation and unremitting self-scrutiny is what makes the greatness of a nation because such steps allow for timely corrective measures, keep leaders on their toes, make them accountable to the electorate and prevent those in the driver's seat to be sleeping on auto-pilot.
It follows from the above truism that 'each generation must, in the lapidary words of Franz Fanon, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it or betray it'.
But, besides the vicarious escapism of the youth from a reality considered too overwhelming, our Achilles' heel resides in the readiness of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie to make blind allegiance to any master basking himself in the happy state of getting the victor's palm without the dust and sweat of racing. Under the tropics, half the harm is due, to cite T.S. Eliot, to people who want to feel important.
The big man syndrome recently decried by President Obama in Accra, Ghana.
The other half is done by people wanting to justify the acronyms against their names.
Hence the proposition that any dynamic educational process must give the workers, peasants and poor the opportunity to be involved in policy orientation and national development activities thereby establishing a concomitant sense of effective participation and commitment for, as Reinhold Niebuhr noted, there is a lot of intelligence in a hungry belly and an aching back.
The Bureaucratic State Trap
Steeped in its self- created insoluble contradictions, the UNIP Government decided to establish in October 1977 a special parliamentary select committee headed by Mr Mwanakatwe.
Commonly referred to as the Mwanakatwe Committee, it subsequently tabled its report and made the following recommendations:
- Need for austerity and orthodoxy in the management of public resource.
- Deconcentration of central power and decision- making process
- End to subsidies and spiralling national debt
- Reduction in military expenditure.
- Rehabilitation of the private sector and encouragement of private investments.
- Enhancement of exports
- Election of part-time as opposed to full-time Central Committee Members.
In keeping with the prevailing political arrogance and truancy, the report was conveniently shelved and the findings buried. Zambia thus missed once more an opportunity to redeem itself and continued its jolly ride to economic and social ruin.
Ten years earlier, the government had invited the world famous French agronomist René Dumont, author of False Start in Africa, to look at the agricultural sector and make a diagnostic. Dumont dutifully complied and wrote a severe report calling for a major restructuring of priorities in favour of the rural sector.
The document was quickly consigned to some obscure archives. The collapse of agriculture has a long trail, arising out of shortsighted political interests and a mixture of lopsided socialist beliefs and undigested capitalist doctrines.
The report on the Lusaka city expansion is another example of political bungling. Experts from the twin city of Los Angeles gave sensible and almost free advice on the capital city's urbanisation which should have seen a drastic reduction of unplanned settlements but again the findings were deemed unpalatable for electoral expediency and simply ignored. The Greater City of Lusaka signboards erected at major road entrances soon disappeared and Lusaka is what it is today: an eyesore and a dark city at night.
Today and under different party colours, the usual know-all, liberalistic do-gooders who have no idea of the fire they are playing with are busy manipulating grave national issues, organising the plunder of whatever resources are at hand and dividing the general public into mutually suspicious blocs, hoping to give an illusion of democracy.
There persists in this part of the world an extractive view of politics which looks at government merely as a benevolent institution or an open sesame from which to garner illicit and amoral advantages. And as Fanon said, being a cabinet minister is an honour without responsibility or risk which ultimately leads to childish complacency.
In 1987, on my return from Montreal, Canada, Mr Mwanakatwe and I had a stimulating overview of the obvious impasse the country was facing. He indicated that his departure from government in the mid -1970's was prompted by its failure to listen to the cries of the people.
And no matter how much he protested and disagreed, he remained bound to the principle of collective responsibility. He could not take that. 'I can still eat and drink without being in government or central committee', he quipped.
Those who were close to him would recall that he remained a worried man for the rest of his life as he came to grips with the fact that the promised egg per day in a land of 'milk and honey' would never materialise under the prevailing socialistic and autocratic policies.
The Zambian population, which is now three times larger, continues to live at what a Chinese poet once called the zero degree of life, except for the lean alley cats who over the years have become the thick-necked, pot-bellied and clean shaven tomcats.
And when we realise that South Korea had in 1964 a GDP comparable to Zambia or Ghana - minus the land mass, natural resources and mineral wealth - our folly is so obvious that the dangers stalking the country seem so horrifyingly clear and the urgency for a drastic remedy so imperative.
We are our worst enemies and it is rather disingenuous to please ourselves with the diversification claptrap compounded by our childish behaviour to hide behind the current global tailspin, this or that crisis.
The former Czech President Klaus Vaclav once rightly pointed out: 'to call our current situation a crisis implies to consider some other period of human history as a non-crisis. I cannot find, however, any moment in the past for which I would use such a term'.
Independence should not drive those who claim to dwell in the land of the free to indulge in futile exercises of exorcising the unfree who are only crying out for food and for a modicum of human dignity.
It is instead a tool that should enable truly free men and women to liberate the marginalised in society, to reduce intolerable inequalities that allow the strong, the crafty and the well-placed to win a large share of society's goods without making corresponding contributions.
We should perhaps take a leaf from Max Weber's theories on the Protestant work ethic which teaches us to make wrong things right, to make them work, to make unfavourable situations favourable and to impress mind on matter for the radical transformation of our milieu. If we don't have that ability, we are nothing at all.
At the collective level, we so easily and emotionally build myths about our leaders and strong men calling them 'fathers of the nation', 'great and wise leaders' and academically titling them at every turn, only to whirl in rage when they are shown to be only human. This is tantamount to asking and perpetually courting revolving mediocre leadership. Nelson Mandela, that rare political icon, refused that kind of worship and remained at a personal, professional and public level the loving family man, modest lawyer and unassuming prison graduate of world fame.
He has never vested himself with doctorate titles in spite of about 50, at my last count, honoris causa conferments from some of the most prestigious universities in the world.
Our nation is thus caught up in untenable, unsustainable and dangerous contradictions. The country's wellbeing is very often measured against the living standards obtaining in New Kasama, Kabulonga, Parklands or Northrise.
Against this backcloth, our elected representatives proclaim ad nauseam our democratic and economic credentials, secure in the forlorn belief that vote casting every five years will usher in a new era of better services and great abundance; whereas the kleptomaniac establishment remains firmly in place and its gurus busy themselves to impose the uniformity of opinions that can only be found in the unanimity of the graveyard.
In July 1996, a US Supreme Court Judge observed that those who hold public office have to suffer unpleasantly sharp attacks. It follows that those brave students, workers and civil society representatives who can take a stand and criticise the low quality of social services, lack of employment opportunities, except for the lucky few, and scandalous abuse of national resources due to lack of priorities are within the bounds of a responsible democratic discourse and are as patriotic as any other normal citizen.
Unfortunately, those in power are immersed in the seductive game of making hackneyed appeals for peace and unity while at the same time enacting selective laws and orchestrating policies which inexorably lead the country backwards to the Stone Age. Thankfully, primitive societies need no prisons or armies or banks.
Surely, history shows that no political ideology or economic system can succeed if it cannot feed, educate and house its people. We must therefore individually and collectively, try to do more to find appropriate cures to our afflictions than simply striving to stay alive, often under the care of western donors' intravenous drips or crumbs from their overflowing tables.
The late President of the Ivory Coast, Felix Houphouet- Boigny, a devout builder of mosques, cathedrals and temples in his homeland, used to say that the hand that gives is always above the hand that receives. We should therefore be ashamed of ourselves when we shamelessly engage in the hobby of courting foreign donors. But according to Karl Marx, shame is a revolutionary sentiment.
It follows that if we tolerate both national and spiritual ugliness as we do everywhere in this country, there is something hauntingly ugly in ourselves. Or is it that we are as a race or continent predestined to remain poor, exploited and humiliated as some erroneous biblical interpretations with regard to Cham's cursed decendancy would make us believe?
The truth of the matter is that Africa is a continent that spends far less for research of any kind in any field and in particular in agriculture than any other region of the world, thus perpetuating a virtuous circle of self- inflicted poverty, waiting for others to make discoveries that must fulfil our greed for affluence.
In this context of Africa's unfinished struggles, we cannot on the other hand fail to see the contradictions in policies which preach the magic of the free market but deny its benefits to exporters of raw materials and semi-finished goods.
Currently, we are witnessing a tragic situation whereby unfair EPAs are being shoved down our throats by the European Union, a new form of colonialism which some African leaders are shamelessly equating to victory and progress.
Nyerere's observation still haunts us: that there can be no free exchange between a dwarf and a giant, no equal relationship from a fundamentally flawed situation of inequality.
To compound the matter, our elected self-seekers have abdicated their responsibilities and shifted the burden to co-operating partners and a host of foreign- controlled NGOs that have turned the aid and HIV/AIDS business into a lucrative industry, with just about 30 per cent of the sourced funds reckoned to trickle down to the needy.
In his book Minding Their Own Business - Zambia's Struggle Against Western Control (1972), Antony Martin has claimed that the most damaging criticism that could be levelled against the colonial and federal governments is that Northern Rhodesia, despite its possession of the richest economy in Africa North of the Limpopo, found itself at independence with a smaller number of educated Africans in relation to the population than virtually any other of Britain's African colonies.
Zambia went into its independence celebrations with only 100 university degree holders and 1000 school certificate graduates. This lack of skilled manpower at all levels greatly constrained Zambia's ambitious development efforts.
As minister of education, Mwanakatwe fought and thought hard to redress this imbalance, to expand and lift up education services. Indeed, the earlier UNZA graduates were as good if not better than their peers in overseas universities where they pursued further qualifications.
Unfortunately, in mid -1970's, government policies and pious aspirations were financially going on a limb and increasingly contradicted by harsh realities on the ground. Standards began to decline dramatically. Existing infrastructure was not adequately maintained and improved upon. Worse still, no new universities were being built to cater for a growing population and swelling demands for places.
The challenge facing us today, notwithstanding the mushrooming of private schools, of dubious quality in some cases, is to search deeply and find the necessary wherewithal to shore up our various seats of knowledge and to bring the state around so that a sharing linkage can fully operate between the research wings in academe and the manufacturing, production and agricultural sectors.
This can be done through a conscious establishment of partially state funded but independent think tanks. This may be a long journey, on account that not everyone on the journey has wisdom at the same place, but it will not lead to a wrong destination.
The New Right or Left.
Historically, Left and Right inherited their tradition from the French revolution in 1789. The Right with its politics of the possible and its business - as - usual believed in the principle of conserving the old aristocratic order and moving incrementally into a new age.
The Left had little time for graduation and was itching for radical structural change to the political system and feudal economic order.
In our context, one wonders where our main political parties stand. However, anyone unblinded by partisan following will recall that the MMD came to power in 1991 on the wings of many promises vowing to realise a complete and irreversible metamorphosis from the old politics, thus donning the habits of the mythological gods able to shower down occasional calamities but mostly heart and stomach - filling goodies on the battered citizenry.
The new culture quickly became a nightmare and the new pluralism made a dramatic U-turn back to old mentalities of no change, see no evil and hear no evil. If anything, airport dancing so gratifying to gender equality advocates became more refined and pleasurable.
Admittedly, there have been some modest achievements and far from me the idea of throwing out the baby with the bath water.
But much more could have been done, had serious and criminal malpractices been kept in check and the goal posts enshrined in the original manifesto not kept shifting. Of course, every government in the world has its seamy side of intrigues and sycophants but even the paid praise singer cannot affirm with a straight face that there has been no systemic failure to turn policy and programmes into sustainable projects, beneficial goods and services for the urban and rural folks.
Three small examples will illustrate my assertions above.
a. The ERB acting executive director recommended the use of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) for cooking and heating as opposed to using electricity power and charcoal (The Post, September 24, 2009). He forgot to mention that this gas is not readily available in Lusaka and I believe other parts of Zambia. In fact, the two companies involved in this line of business charge vastly different prices. One of them even appears to apply prices based on fictitious costs.
Furthermore, unlike in West Africa, Zambians are not familiar with the benefits of gas usage. They need to be sensitised. In Abidjan, Ivory Coast, supplies are available in most service stations and small township shops at the cost of 4,000 CFAF (K30,000) for a 13kg cylinder. An empty cylinder for deposit purposes would cost 20,000 CFAF (K150,000).
b. The Post of October 3, 2009 reports that a safari and trophy hunter, usually a rich Westerner, pays K2.5 milion only for the pleasure of killing a buffalo. This is about 340 British Pounds, a paltry sum that may not be sufficient to buy a box of good Havana cigars. ZAWA and the Ministry of Tourism must be advised that this is not the best way to maximize returns from our natural resources.
c. Finance minister Dr Situmbeko Musokotwane recently declared that the entry of new commercial banks in the country would reduce the cost of lending through induced competition (The Post, October 29, 2009). Zambia is fairly unique in the world to have a central bank (BoZ) that lacks a legal and regulatory framework to set base lending rates in the financial sector. Instead commercial banks, mortgage and microfinance institutions are having a field day and laughing all the way to the bank (no pun intended)!
This is happening in a country with a narrow and weak economy, massive formal unemployment and a gyrating currency (the exchange rate was K1,428 in December 1997 per US $) that creates a house-of-mirrors setting with regard to asset valuation, per capita consumption, long-term savings and project investments.
We all know what role central banks in many countries have played in government efforts to stave off the deleterious effects of the financial meltdown. Nearer to home the central bank of Kenya reviewed its rates by 25 basis points to 7.75 per cent while the cash ratio reserve was lowered to 4.5 percent (The East African, August 10 -16, 2009, p6 ). It is suicidal for the local bourgeois be to think this country can afford a 100 per cent liberalisation binge in the financial sector.
We need vigorous but flexible interventionist policies for developmental purposes. Finally one wonders why there is such a proliferation of exchange bureaux some of them owned by powerful business networks and shady operators. They seem to ply their trade under very loose oversight as if this country is a shareholder in the Federal Reserve Bank.
At the other end of the political spectrum, the opposition - call it Left if you will - is narrowly focused on the issue of exercising power with little strategy on how to jump the bonfires the ruling party will surely activate by election time.
The opposition should start focusing systematically, methodically and consistently on an unfulfilled campaign promises, offering feasible and credible counter proposals. This is especially urgent in the provincial towns and rural areas where the needs are so acute and hopelessness so rampant.
In Zambia, we indeed seem to suffer from a post-election hibernation syndrome that begins with a hastily swearing ceremony that puts aggrieved competitors before a fait accompli. Thereafter, voters and bitter adversaries return to their dreary routines and the victors engage in the tragi-comedy of bickering for posts and fighting over the spoils.
There is thus a readiness to assume that power that is top heavy and out of control is a necessary or inevitable ingredient of the democratic process even though it inevitably dis-empowers the citizenry and aggravates national poverty levels.
This, surely, is a betrayal of the ideals of the struggle for self-rule, especially when the power of the ballot box has been effectively marginalised by corruption and suspected rigging and parliament becomes largely a charade behind which the power of money and gratification works its will and thus the pretence of representative government is simply dancing attendance on it. It then becomes evident that our form of governance is technically not a democracy but a republic entrusted to a few.
The Forgotten Past
At independence, democratic institutions were hastily concocted and grafted to the authoritarian substructure of the colonial state to permit the coloniser to leave with honour and a less guilty conscience. (Crawford Young, Ideology and Development in Africa, 1982). In his well researched book Mbeleshi:
A History of the London Missionary Society, Rev Dr. Bwalya. S. Chuba reports some views on Africans emanating from dedicated parsons as 'child mind,below par and without any helpful past' and elsewhere as 'savage, barbarous as well as heathen' (Pula Press, 2000). In portrait of a coloniser, Felix Ekechi makes the point that in pre-colonial and colonial periods Africans were generally perceived as 'children, wild as a colt to be disciplined and thus raised slowly in the scale of civilisation'. (African Studies Review No.1, 1983).
My view and plea is that this dark view of our painful past should not bear the light of present history, even though Young exonerates us somewhat when he remarks that the mercantilist capitalism of the colonial state, with a vocation for domination and exploitation, had no relationship at all with liberal democracy. Be that as it may, Bizeck J. Phiri drives home the fact that 'at independence in 1964, President Kaunda stated openly that he favoured a one-party state but that the people would have to decide that multiparty system unnecessarily divided people... Since nation building followed decolonization, multiparty liberal democracy was perceived an obstacle towards that goal'. (Geneva- Africa N0 1, 1991).
In 1968 , Kaunda announced some administrative reforms and stressed the need to 'decentralise in centralism... we will decentralise most of our Party and Government activities while retaining effective control of the Party and Government machinery in the interest of unity'.
He contended that 'the main intention of the reforms was to make the rural economy a dynamic force in the development of the country'. Obviously, whether this was to be achieved or not depended above all on the often unskilled District Governor, a political appointee remotely connected to the Provincial Deputy Minister, who had supplanted the career administrative officer known as District Secretary.
1. ZIS, 1968; Background Papers No. 84/68; President Kaunda's speech to UNIP delegates at Mulungushi, November 1968.
2. Tordoff, William: Provincial and Local Government in Zambia, Journal of Administration Overseas, Overseas Volume IX, No. 1, Jan 1970, pp 23-35.
3. Simmance, AJF: Urbanisation of Zambia, Journal of Administration Overseas, Overseas Vol XIII No. 4, 1974, PP 498-507.
4. Simonis Heide and Udo E. (Eds): Social Economic Development in Dual Economies - The Example of Zambia, Nunchen, Welt forum Verlag, 1971
A number of Africanists and Zambian chroniclers have pointed out that unlike the colonial District Commissioners who were the uncrowned monarchs of the areas they ruled with iron fists and got things done for the general welfare of the population, the post-independence DG or DC is an excrescence of a flabby and rudderless government bureaucracy unable to execute policies and programmes that can truly move specific areas and the country forward.
The fact that in 1984, according to some social studies, many people in rural areas claimed that they were materially much better off in colonial days is self- evident and a searing indictment on the ruling class which needs no explications here.
The failures have been so patent, except perhaps in prosperous urban enclaves which have experienced some facelift amounting to what Heide and Udo Simonis have characterized as 'growth without development'.
The author is:
- Former executive director, Multimedia Zambia
- Former director, ISACOM Institute, Abidjan
- Former senior communications officer, ADB , Abidjan, Ivory Coast
- Author of a forthcoming book on Governance, Aid and Development.
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