Earlier this week, our beloved President Hakainde Hichilema officiated at the pass out parade of ZNS officer cadets in the sleepy town of Kafue.
No sooner the cat got out of the bag one of them was actually the President’s son, the later there was a conflagration on the mountain! Harsh critics and vicious detractors of the President of all kinds went into overdrive casting aspersions and banding around all sorts of conspiracy theories.
Ndipo people can be petty….we expected citizens to join President Hichilema and the first family in celebrating this feat as opposed to brewing a storm in a tea cup!
If we may call a spoon a spoon, and not a folk, this country has witnessed the worst in the past in terms of the first children (Presidents’ children). We once had a trigger-happy son of a president who would go into a frenzy terrorising night clubs grabbing people’s girl friends, if not jumping into the official vehicles of State House and spend the whole day burning fuel wheeling around the traffic circles as the cops watched in disbelief! Then there was another notorious son of a president….nay, a mafia who literally turned Plot 1 Independence Avenue into a thiefdom….he practically commandeered the procurement of fuel from the safety of State House let alone left his dirty finger prints on some of the major government contracts and projects.
Just when we thought we’ve had enough of drama from the Presidential children, came along another family that would always be in the news for all the wrong reasons. They would come into conflict with the law for suddenly acquiring unexplained wealth – prime properties in affluent neighborhoods, fleets of impressive limousines and swelling Bank accounts in every financial institution on Earth!
Now where is all this noise about a seemingly decent boy that steps out of his massively comfort zone and finds himself at ZNS eating bean, growing cabbages, tending to goats and doing ichilailai (road runs) wee hours of the day coming from, if not pure hatred?
It was within the President’s power and influence to see his son join the more superior entities such as the army or ZAF but he settled for the much lower rung of the military – ZNS, isn’t this surely commendable? Let’s learn to give praise where it is due for once; President Hichilema’s children are morally upright!
Anyway, we rest our case for now…
Prince Bill M. Kaping’a
Political/Social Analyst
Zambezi
