By Micheal Sibelo
”There is something terribly wrong with a political philosophy that turns us into people that hate one another in our own country. In a country that we should love together, salute our flag together, sing our anthem together and then we can go and argue politics”
~ ANDREW KLAVAN
Never in history have we observed a time where politics become this divisive and harmful. Today, the fastest way to lose friends and family is to dare express an unpopular political opinion. This isn’t a problem specific to Zambia. You can go to any country in the world such as South Africa, The U.K, America and you will find that divided populations are now the norm.
Politics has turned more into a team sport rather than a tool of national development. We are so driven by seeing our guys win we never stop to ask the question, ”Then What?”. As die-hard political ‘sports fans’ we root and cheer for our team even if we see no tangible gain or direction. We, unknowingly, become victims of Group-Think and which often leads to ideological ‘group blindness’. The danger of this trend is that no significant tangible or development can ever take place.
Politics, in its best form, is design to be a healthy competition of ideas aimed at the improvement of the people. Like businesses compete to give the consumers a better product/service, so too should the politics compete to offer better ideas. The system we currently have has not proven conducive to the competition of ideas. As it stands one party gets into power and the remain parties spend the next 5 years being combative. At their core, political parties are social groups and as social groups, they can orchestrate change in some way. Nothing stops opposition parties from forming generating member revenue to form shadow governments.
Let’s take the policy of youth empowerment funds as a simple example. As the Government roles out a K470 million youth empowerment fund, what exactly stops any opposition party from creating a K5 million miniature empowerment fund that can run the way they think it should be. If the people were to see UPND, NDC, MMD, NAREP empowerment funds alongside the government’s they could make an objective assessment of which one is better. The competition of ideas keeps everyone’s mind on the common goal of bettering the lives of the people rather than electoral victory. This kind of model can be replicated in many areas of governance.
If opposition parties took the approach of exhibiting their ideas in miniature formats it would keep the ruling party on its toes. Added to this, it would also give the citizenry a better experience and more confidence of whom to elect. Think of the competition between Shoprite, Spar, and PicknPay. These stores don’t spend their days de-campaigning each other instead they fight for your money by giving you better offerings. Imagine if these three stores just spent the day lobbing negative adverts at each other.
Currently, opposition parties have chosen to stand idle and hope for the failure of the government as points to campaign on. Under this system, the goal of politics will never be to development and progress. Each party will just seek to look better than your opponent and battle for optics and perception. In this environment, the incumbent also becomes defensive of their optics and perception. This is the source of TOXIC POLITICS, where it is about optics, popularity, and perception rather than tangible progress.
It is up to the voters to stand and say to the opposition parties, that they would like to see better. For the people to say they would like to see a display of competing ideas to base their decisions on and not just rhetoric and critiques. At the end of the day, that is why we fought multiparty democracy otherwise we are running a rotating 1 party state.
Under this environment people will always be divided into groups to paraphrase President Woodrow Wilson:
”You cannot dedicate yourself to your country unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thorough citizens of your country. You cannot become thorough citizens if you think of yourselves in groups. Our Nation does not consist of groups. A man who thinks of himself as belonging to a particular national group in our country has not yet become a true citizen of his country…”
Politics is literally putting Patriotism, the dedication of the people to a nation at risk. Without patriotism, the soul of a nation slowly dies.
We as a nation are going to struggle to develop in a system where everything is based on optics and division. The truth is not all tangible progress is visible but we have incentivised politicians to only seek that which is visible rather than what is impactful.
Micheal (sic) Sibelo, l don’t think u know wht u’re talking about because u even believe that there’s such a thing government empowerment program. U don’t pick entrepreneurs like that. There’s a previous empowerment program where it rained in Higer buses in 2015 on the land of a few lucky ones. Nothing has come out of it.
Eya mwane, Ba Sibelo. Mwalasa!! Rwanda, Tanzania and Botswana have developed consistent and progressive national policies that have moved them ahead of many African peers-common denominator: SINGLE PARTY POLITICS OVER TIME. Democracy has had a negative effect on Zambia, even after 6 presidents. It has created a loophole for foregn interests to fund and influence ideology in opposition politics. Instead of parties challenging with ideas, it’s vicious power struggles at the expense of developmental policies. Corruption is the main tool of these foreign funders they use it to discredit and undermine African leaders while Courts dismiss these often inconclusive and malicious corruption claims and false accusations. We need a better political set up.
“……what exactly stops any opposition party from creating a K5 million miniature empowerment fund that can run the way they think it should be…..”
You are missing the open goal by far….
If other political parties create these empowerment funds , they will simply be campaining for lungu because only lungu and his gang are allowed to meet the people to promote those programmes while the opposition are banned from promoting any empowerment programme….
In any case opposition can not be allowed to do that……Remember when HH wanted to donate generators to a chawama clinic, he was stopped from doing so.
Be reallistic, why should ruling party cadres benefit from schemes financed by tax payers’ money while you ask private citizens to finance opposition schemes?
Well written article.
Allow me to add this; this will be a problem for as long as we won’t let ourselves or nor teach our children on how to have a civil conversation about difficult topics.
Excellent perspective!
UPND should have commissioned and implemented their governance model in their strongholds – Southern Province, Western Province and North Western Province. This need not be grandiose projects such as roads or schools or hospitals. Just take back the bus stations and markets from the cadresand hand them to the local authorities and demonstrate how it should be done especially on the front of accountability.
David N
How do they do that when the police are protecting the PF caders
?
Spaka
One would assume in the strongholds there would be majority UPND cadres in the markets and bus stations and they would take heed of the Master’s Voice and hand over the facilities to the local authorities.. Try it and get to the point were the Police intervenes. Then we will have seen the injustice rather than just assuming.