By Nkonkomalimba Kafunda
A recent Transparency International Zambia study has revealed that in 2021 it cost, on average, a whopping , mind boggling K3.9 million to run a successful parliamentary campaign. TIZ interviewed 80 members of parliament from across the aisle including independents after the August 2021 polls.
What this means, essentially, is that you must just have sufficient funds, not necessarily grey matter, leadership skills, integrity and a moral compass to become an MP in this country. The cost drivers, while several, have a common theme, corruption. For a year and a half prior to elections, aspiring candidates spent thousands of hard and not so hard earned Kwacha buying their way to parliament via voter’s stomachs, proving, yet again, that there is a negative co-relation between democracy and poverty.
Party officials in the guise of grassroots organizers claimed money for logistics, talk time, food and the inevitable enormous amounts of highly intoxicating alcohol for efficient and effective party mobilization . The candidates where also expected to be chief mourners at every funeral in their polling districts providing food booze, transport, cash and coffins.
Not surprisingly, the biggest cost driver came at adoption by the party, when those dolling out the adoption certificates now ask for an arm, a leg and a soul particularly in areas where voting patterns show that an adoption on a certain party ticket is an idiot proof anointment, not election, to parliament.
It follows, therefore, that the most logical priority for the newly elected or anointed MP , as the case may be, is to recover his funds In any way and as quick as possible, the fastest way being an appointed to cabinet where you can manipulate contracts under your ministry for personal gain as a kind of refund.
For those in the ruling party, unfortunate not to land a cabinet spot (and they are many), the strategy is to tow the party line, exhibiting ridiculous levels of blind loyalty, basically becoming a bootlicking sycophant interested only in pleasing the top brass so as to be in pole position in case of a cabinet vacancy , as the people’s will is of little or no consequence. This entails keeping your mouth shut especially during contentious debates and, once in a while, asking an irrelevant, nonsensical, time wasting, leading questions to gift the Vice President an opportunity to malign the opposition and glorify the UPND, during Friday’s Vice President’s question time
That, in a nutshell, is the state of our parliamentary democracy, it is easier for a VX to pass through the eye of a needle than a poor man to enter the Zambian parliament.
What does the report suggest happens? Reform election finance? Or reform structrally what forms the cost of election finance and paying people to elect/adopt you?
Right now there is a debate in the adoption process that one former MP be adopted in Petauke? Who is vetting the candidate? How much do the people have a saying in the process? How much does the public value in the say as to elects them?
Idiocy costs, and so if elections are that costly, then know that there’s a lot of idiocy going on. It’s not an election but a process to display a lack of grey matter by the actors
Don’t forget the cost of transporting and feeding Upnd bus loads that descended on Kawambwa. Obviously each cadre was paid something.
You’ve seen nothing yet wait till 2026
that cost will go down in history undoubtedly