Today, I want to share my deepest thoughts and feelings about the sad reality of the hunger, poverty and despair that is prevailing in our homeland, among our people currently.
I want to candidly and fairly convey my true feelings and experiences about the situation we are faced with, not as a politician but as a leader and parent, who is also raising a family in the midst of the high cost of living we are experiencing as a nation.
Certainly, the rising cost of living is hurting and there don’t seem to be quick political fixes our people were promised. No one today is saying “Bally will fix it” – not even Bally himself. This is worrying.
With the rising cost of living, our people are feeling the pressure financially, psychologically and otherwise. Words fail me to best describe the level of grief, sadness, anger and hunger I have come into contact with during my visits to several and different households and communities across the country – both in urban centers like Lusaka and the Copperbelt, and rural areas like Chinsali, where I am a traditional leader.
In my trips to these communities, the sadness, brokenness and desperation, which the rise in cost of living has brought to our people is heartbreaking and painful. We have witnessed unprecedented levels of hunger, poverty and despair amongst citizens, which is difficult to comprehend and later on articulate in a way that best reflects what is currently happening in our nation.
It is a fact that the rising cost of living is more than an economic squeeze: it is a public health emergency, potentially on a par with the COVID-19 pandemic. Not being able to afford the essentials, such as food, rent, electricity or transport, has wide-ranging negative impacts on mental and physical health and well-being.
Families are in distress. Basic daily feeding has become a very big challenge. Our mothers, our wives, our aunties, our sisters are failing to sleep. Blood pressures are rising exponentially with the rise in the cost of living. Far too many people in the country today can barely afford a meal or two in a day. We have seen how some households have devised a system to ensure that at least everybody eats something to keep them going. And this system involves members of the household to alternate between meals; where one group eats lunch and leaves dinner for the other group that skipped lunch to eat as well.
This may sound weird and baffling but that is the reality. It’s happening in many households. Families are stressed and are breaking as providers battle to deal with the mental trauma of losing a livelihood and the inability to cope with the situation and fend for their families. Definitely, there is a silent but tragic story unfolding in our country today and politicians should urgently protect the most vulnerable, those in distress.
These problems cannot be left to our pastors, reverends, priests and other religious leaders when even the Sunday church offerings are declining because congregants have nothing or have very little to put in the basket. This is the first experience of such sharp and sustained cost of living increases since the 1980s. But unions were stronger and pay agreements were very different then.
While prices are increasing everyday our earning power has been stuck in a rut. The cost of living has increased steadily and relentlessly over the past two years. But our political system means politicians’ promises to tackle it have been largely futile.
It will get worse. This gnaws away at a person’s dignity.
An experience typically reserved for the poor is now afflicting middle classes and they aren’t happy. It is spilling over to our politics and there’s panic in the political leadership of our country. They are scared about how the people will react to all this. They don’t want anyone to talk about it – hence the attempt to silence key opposition leaders and critics. They are scared that talking about these issues may spark protests, hence the attempt to silence, intimidate the opposition with charges of treason, espionage and so on and so forth.
But this will not work. They can silence a few timid politicians, hire some spineless, hungry and greed opposition politicians to speak for them, but it won’t help them much. They can’t silence the hungry masses of our people because if there’s no one to speak for them – because their authentic representatives have been silenced – they will eventually start to directly speak for themselves. And their language will be very clear to be ignored!
This uncontrolled daily increase in the cost of living is a time bomb! Therefore, arresting us on trumped up treason or espionage charges won’t do – it will be an exercise in futility which is bound to backfire. And without us the explosion of this time bomb may be uncontrollable.
We socialists are patriots. With or without us we would like to see Mr Hakainde Hichilema and his league succeed in addressing these very distressing challenges facing our people and our homeland. We don’t want to defeat them on the back of national failure. There will be enough reasons to seek their removal on August 13, 2026. Baleya!
Fred M’membe
……….
Cde Membe, cde Membe………
Why don’t you apply for food aid from the UN…….
If you think the situation is so bad………?
And the bally is still fixing the PF mess, which………
Is more widespread and devastating than previously envisioned
Forward 2031……
And beyond
…PF mess, which UPND always reinvents and exaggerates so that it is now more widespread and devastating than previously imagined
Paulsy Bilitiz
That is correct……..
It is actually the miracle works by the president and his GRZ that zambia is still afloat considering what we found………
And are still uncovering looting cases every week that are a throwback to the lungu regime………
Doom and Gloom from this chap all the time
Why doesnt he contribute workable solutions
Instead of his crying constantly
Tell them comrade. Upnd big0ts are in denial. They spend all day farting and smelling their farts and hallucinating that everything is fine. Chlshupu cha mabisi
Hamwale fuseke you chi upnd thug. Go complain to your ugly father and mother
Do tax evaders feel the high cost of living?
Kayipushe ba whistle
Get a life Kaizar or are u Fred in disguise?
And while he was meeting those poor people to assess their hunger,he did not tell them that he is bisexual.He didnt explain to them that he sleeps with both men and women,but Zambia is a christian nation
Mu zambian if your father spreads his legs to put food on table, don’t assume everyone else does it. Upnd is the government that is allowing homosexuality. Go to hell
Whats wrong with this Kaizar imbecile? His response to anything is to insult the parents of the poster. How such a bankrupt mind found himself in State House one wonders. We should definitely celebrate the ousting of such lice from our institutions
Mwale ba whistle!!!
Mmembe you’re just a Politician and if you really care about Zambia why don’t you work with the current Government…just like any opposition…they’re complaining about the cost of living but at the same time they want things to get even worse so that they can have something to campaign about…things are tough all over the world and its not only in Zambia
We have head of such excuses before. We know things are tough and that’s why we need proactive leaders to create local solutions to absorb those shocks. Failure is inevitable if UPND thinks it will have sympathetic votes over the world happenings. Our eyes are wide open and gone are those days politicians would lie to us.
So to some of you, it is so wrong for the opposition to point out how biting the economy is?
While New Dawn looked like they are a solution to Zambia’s mess, they are in fact complicit: weak in the knees and spine that nothing is moving forward. Debt repayment is currently frozen, so what mess are you tackling? Half way in govt, UPND still behaves like they are in opposition!
@Timbwi
Politicians are all the same and they always have different agendas depending who are their main backers…Mmembe has his own backers and once he becomes President first thing will be impressing his backers….he won’t do anything to help Zambia…HH is working to impress his backers….Late Christon Tembo took alot of money from Foreign backers when he was running for office and after he lost elections you probably know what happened to his assets….
We need to find Leaders who can grow our economy with our own resources…not pocket change from predators IMF or World Bank……
Reported..c
VP Nalumango explains that as long as Edgar Lungu doesn’t tell the nation what his stand is, the kwacha will continue to depreciate against the Dollar.
So please advise Lungu to come out in the open.
Helplessly hoping ba VP
Thats why Economics should be banned. Its not a profession. Everything goes as long as an economist can convince a bunch of fools. How else did HH hoodwink a government about the low pricing of assets they knew. Anything can be said to affect anything. Currencies depreciate because of an arrest, a speech, an eclipse of the sun, a church sermon etc
Lungu with PF as Axis of Evil that Zambia ever had, so to speak, is responsible for the unbearable food prices. When justfying high fuel prices last year, did she not tell us that commodity prices first have to shoot up before falling down? Blame games and scapegoats are the new normal for the New Dawn.
The biggest mistake we as Zambians have continued to make is to place hope in people that speak to our emotions like you. There’s no single Zambian that can address these challenges alone. We saw how MCS failed to quickly turn things around because the people around him weren’t with him. In 1986 there were widespread riots because of the price of mealie meal. KK reversed the prices and later gave coupons to the vulnerable but still that didn’t solve the problem. The MMD took advantage and wrestled power from UNIP, but were they better?
Like someone I know believed that HH was going to bring in his money to prop up our vulnerable Kwacha.
Tell us what you are going to do
“The sad reality of the hunger, poverty and despair that is prevailing in our homeland … among our people currently.” These problems are partly due the “socialist” nature of our country’s socioeconomic system. KK’s administration ran the economy through the Industrial Development Corporation (INDECO), Chiluba tried to dismantle the system, Sata re-introduced INDECO through another version of the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC). We still have IDC under the UPND administration. The socioeconomic problems Zambia is currently facing are partly a result of state-operated monopolies associated with socialist ideals that Freddie would wish to introduce at a higher level.