Zambia at Fifty Five

By Evaristo Mupeta

Part 1:A Creation Of Beauty And Bosom Of Minerals

Zambia is your name

You have an identity of a high spiritual connotation:

Zambia the Christian Nation.

We belong, we stand, we walk, we serve

A people liberated:men, women and the children

In this land of our birth and upbringing

The land we are proud of.

This nation our land

The land of awesome physical features

The land far beneath full of copper and other minerals with richness and glowness any daring miner would love.

The land of meandering rivers that flow and gush out water in enthralling loudness like the rhythmic beats of the traditional Zambian drum.

The land of game parks, their brown soils and natural scented tropical vegetation with wild animals that lull and amaze many tourists.

In you Zambia, the sun rising in summer a large orange ball glowing in beauty.

In you Zambia, the sun in its fading moments like a rich weary traveller going to lodge in an inn equal to his noble status.

Zambia, you are truly a creation of irresistible beauty and splendour.

To Zambia, my patriotism and loyalty I reaffirm

To Zambia, my energies to expend on

To Zambia, my sacrifices to sow

To Zambia, my creativity to channel

To Zambia, my toils to toward.

All you that till the land

All you that excavate the minerals Zambia is endowed with

Those in offices as much those in other spheres of life

Great you all are, you are the resource that pulsate the land with life

More of your hard work the land is calling for

The land we love, the land we cherish.

Zambia forward to propel

Prosperity in its distance from Zambia near than the great distances in the land.

Part 2:A Dream Deferred -Poverty And Its Pangs

Now, mother Zambia.

At fifty five:

Your eyes as porous to tears and tension as tumbled borders left to a mass of illegal immigrants

Need I you tell mother the cause of your troubled conscience?

Me, who has now matured to manhood.

At fifty five:

When celebration and acceleration to be the hall marks in the halls of our cities

It is a month of polar contrast-of grief

A time of sorrowfully commemorating

A dream deferred

The dream of what by far should have been.

The woe of poverty must be wiped out of our land

Being indexed as a poor nation

Must not in any way be our permanent and proud status

This is the battle we must viciously fight

As we valiantly fought for political independence.

Oh, mother Zambia

Who of many of your people are not pricked by poverty and its pangs?

Pangs with sharpness equal to the “pangas” in viciousness clenched into the hands of some party cadres during some by elections.

Oh, mother Zambia

The struggles of your people daily encounters and experiences:

Mini bus drivers restlessly swerving their vehicles and hooting repeatedly in congested stations to beat their cash targets

Men, women and youths like high drilled soldiers trooping from compounds at dawn for their legal and illegal points to transact until evening.

Many conditioned to labour: they laboured yesterday, they labour today, they may labour tomorrow.

Oh, mother Zambia

I now tell tales of your residents of proximity to shopping malls

The malls are to them monsters to mauling their existence.

Too close to the mega shops

Too poor to purchase from there.

At fifty five:

Mother, you who was born a victor

They have thrust you into the victim hood of load shedding

One moment there is power, the next there is none

Subjected to waiting that is frustrating and seemingly long as though the clock set back to the medieval ages

Affected are all persons and plans.

The barber shops, the hair saloons, the restaurants – many other informal businesses

Indispensable businesses the owners cherish like their own hearts.

The mining industry-the main foreign exchange, adversely affected

The agricultural, manufacturing and other key economic sectors, adversely affected

The projected economic growth , adversely affected.

Now,

Less energy.

Less income.

No money in people’s pockets.

At fifty five:

I have yet many things to tell you

Mother, now you have become the best than before in the art of borrowing

Begging with a bowl in your hands for huge sums of money from rich nations your routine, your relief

You fear the sharks in the oceans than you fear the loan sharks with their debasing and devouring conditions

Oh mother Zambia, some loans could be two things in one: buttered bread and a doubled edged sword

Oh, mother Zambia, I dread being cumbered with more debts as I dread the chilly winter season of Lusaka

I fear the future generations being in perpetual bondage to debts

As I fear being recolonised by those you owe the much money

Mother, watch out, lest our land, this our land,

be taken away by those you owe moneys by the gross

But of groceries few Zambians can afford.

Our land, this land, her soul and resources controlled from other capital cities

Oh, mother Zambia, do not auction our sovereignty, our pride, our destiny, just like that.

At fifty five:

See now the dangers you are now in, deeper than the depth of the Zambezi River

Always with shoe string budgets

The budgets of recurrent expenditures and consumption

Huge amounts on public workers’ salaries and servicing the huge external debt

Little on development and the welfare of the majority.

I have said to you mother before, in whispers and loudness

This gullibility of yours , often deceived by some of those who promise they can salvage you

To make the people savour every of your moment;

Some of those you tell to serve and save you

Theirs are motives of insincerity

The charlatans ,the corrupt

They have wormed their way into your great space

Some only after plundering the vast wealth beneath your ground.

Do you not discern mother?

Do you not see mother?

At fifty five:

I will listen to their rhetoric at the arenas they have arranged for us to be addressed

We the common who take seats that expose us to October’s scorching heat

I will listen out of patriotism-and because I am a good listener.

You seem not to have any more plans for economic correctness

Your words to me like chaff or puffs of thick white smoke blown from a tobacco pipe

Slowly coiling up, forming rings and disappearing in the air

Your speeches and flattery I know.

So I ask again: where from here do we go?

Part 3:God My Truth And Trust

Have I not spoken? Have I not seen?

Me who sees everything in the CBD from the floors of the city’s tallest buildings

From the tower I can see the Kulima Tower bus terminal

I am profound, prophetic and poetic

I see and perceive with prayers and precision

The energy, the expectations of the people

People burdened, people who do not know where their next meal, even without tomato sauce, to source.

Yet, their faces gleaming with joy and laughter characteristic of the godly and good Zambia spirit

Yes, the people have the inalienable and great yearning:

In you Zambia to live better than the struggles and squalor daily they go through

In you mother Zambia.

At fifty five:

I have another thing to tell you.

Transience every person’s friend ;leaders come and go

Today in power; tomorrow gone, gloriously or ingloriously

This mother you must inculcate into them

Do not just include them on the programme for no purpose

In Zambia the Christian Nation

Faith evoked in me as in numerous others

Of the nation’s possibilities of earth shaking victories

Only in God my entire trust I place.

To the mountains as varied, valleyed, and valued in Zambia

As in other parts of the world mine eyes I raise

Where shall my deliverance come from?

Only from God my whole salvation comes

Not in the lies and purposes of men and women

Mother Zambia, in you I still believe as when in you I was gracefully birthed

I am a patriot of your whole being.

Zambia, my mother Zambia.