Before I get down to my own view on why politicians keep our youth in abject scarcity, allow me to steal the words of a PF Die-hard Maxwell Chongo. My good brother complained bitterly, insinuating that our youth are living in abject poverty including himself. He alleged that even those in the PF are complaining and feeling the economic stress. It was as if he was reading my mind when drafting his submission.

What is disappointing in his rantings however is the sense of entitlement the PF members seem to have regarding awarding of contracts. In his comment, he surprisingly challenges the minister of housing to work with the National Youth Executive Committee of the Patriotic Front when implementing construction projects. His whinge partly explains why we have a challenge with young people in this country. We seem to be so happy with waiting for those with the instruments of power to give us the things we desire. We can’t think of how we can make it in life on our own. Maxwell cried bitterly that most contracts are given to the Chinese forgetting the PF youths who campaigned strongly for president Lungu. .

The sad news for Max and his friends is that the PF won’t give them true and sustainable empowerment. It is in the DNA of politicians in Africa to identify talents in young people and use it for their own gain. The PF leadership will ensure that Max and friends remains in the state of poverty unless they decide to learn something from Lusaka Province Minister Bowman Lusambo. This is the only way the PF can remain in control of their youths such as Maxwell. The fear from the PF is that if the youths are given proper empowerment then the party won’t have heavies to use in 2021.

In Zambia today, we have a lot of young people who have constantly remained subjects and have failed to graduate to the level of being citizens.

The difference between the two is that a subject acts according to what they are instructed by their pay master, it does not matter whether the action is legal or illegal. A subject never asks questions WHY, they just act.

A citizen on the other hand makes an informed decision. Citizens are empowered with knowledge and material things also. A citizen won’t do something because they are being given a K50, NOT AT ALL. Every decision a citizen makes is a conscious decision based on principle. Until we get to a time when we usher into government the kind of leadership that will believe in creating a conducive environment for the young people to thrive in business and careers, our youth will continue lurching in poverty.

The current PF leadership does not have the capacity and political will to ensure that the young people in this country are lifted off the poverty data line. It seems as though the PF carried over from where the MMD left in terms of subjecting our people to poverty and yet hoard wealth for themselves and their families.

As I conclude, I wish to remind us that until now over 60% of our people live below the poverty line with circa 42% classified as being extremely poor. This figure represents just about half of our population. Due to poor health care coupled with high poverty level, life expectancy in Zambia stands at only 37 years making our country the fourth-lowest in the world.

It is therefore important that moving forward we find a lasting solution to the many challenges our young men and women like Maxwell Chongu and others are faced with. Next week we shall look at some of the workable solutions the future government can implement in order to reduce poverty in our great nation. We need to lift our young generation from entirely depending on government and begin creating wealth at personal and community level.

Lastly I wish to thank our women for being such great inspiration in our lives. To the youth, I urge you to stand up, be counted and be the change you want to see. Dare to ‘Believe Again’.

God bless Zambia.

Mwizenge Tembo had just returned to his boarding school in Zambia’s remote provincial capital of Chipata after the Christmas holiday when one of his friends entered the dorm and showed him dance moves that would influence his life.

It was December 1970 and American singer James Brown had just visited Zambia, where he performed two concerts. Tembo’s friend, who had been one of the 20,000 fans packed into Dag Hammarskjöld Stadium in the city of Ndola, described the spectacle to his pals. Brown, the friend said, had arrived on the stage like a bouncing Ping-Pong ball as police held back a hysterical crowd. Then, imitating Brown, Tembo’s friend spun around the dorm floor like an ice skater, shuffled his feet, gestured with his left hand toward his crotch and dropped to the floor in a split.

Tembo, 17, had never seen Brown, but in that moment he was hooked. And unknown to him at the time, so was most of Zambia’s youth. But the Godfather of Soul, as Brown was known, wasn’t just a cultural phenomenon in the southern African nation. He was central to a largely forgotten but tumultuous chapter in U.S.-Zambia relations that saw the two countries pull apart — their leaders snubbing each other — before rebuilding bridges that rested on a musical bond.

In October 1970, Kenneth Kaunda, Zambia’s first post-independence president, was scheduled to meet with U.S. President Richard Nixon in Washington alongside other African leaders, but the White House postponed the meeting. Slighted, Kaunda refused to meet Nixon at the reassigned time. But two months later, Kaunda, a longtime supporter of the American civil rights movement, made sure to pose with Brown during the singer’s tour of the country.

Brown’s visit “surely helped Kaunda’s reputation with young Black Zambians,” says Andrew DeRoche, a historian at the University of Colorado Boulder and author of the 2016 book Kenneth Kaunda, the United States and Southern Africa. It also highlighted the deep connection Zambian youth like Tembo felt with African-American music icons of the time. “James Brown was seen as the hero who was transcending the dominant white narrative, because of his success everywhere,” says Tembo, now a professor of sociology at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where he teaches African culture and anthropology.

As one of the first African nations to gain independence from its colonial rulers, in 1964, Zambia enjoyed a special place for African-American political and cultural leaders, also because of its central role in the struggle for freedom in southern Africa, says DeRoche. In 1960, Kaunda — then a freedom fighter — had visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. A year later, President John F. Kennedy invited Kaunda to talks in the White House, signaling his administration’s recognition of the Zambian leader’s growing profile. Civil rights leaders like Coretta King and Congressman Andrew Young counted Kaunda as an ally.

“As an advocate for nonviolence who had direct contact with Martin Luther King, Kaunda had major credibility with African-Americans such as Young and Coretta King,” says DeRoche.

American pop culture was already big in Zambia, says Tembo. But for a Black African nation grappling with its post-independence identity, Brown’s visit was special. “Some of my friends who had money got ‘James Brown’ suits stitched,” he recalls. “James Brown was playing like 50 percent of the time on the radio six months after he left. ‘Sex Machine,’ ‘Say it Loud’ … all those songs.”

None of those cultural connections appeared to benefit bilateral relations between the two countries — at first. The Nixon administration ignored southern Africa. During a December 1973 meeting with the leader of Portugal, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger “admitted that he did not know if Zambia had a border with Angola,” says DeRoche.

But the U.S. State Department had noticed the bond that Brown and others had forged with Zambia, and in 1973 it convinced Duke Ellington to visit Zambia as part of an African trip. The department “last week concluded [a] contract to pick up Duke Ellington and orchestra” after a fall tour to Europe, for a brief visit to East Africa, says a July 4, 1973, State Department cable, released by WikiLeaks in 2014. The American ambassador to Zambia, Jean Wilkowski, who was the first woman ambassador the U.S. had sent to Africa, was instrumental in organizing the event. The U.S. administration possibly found the milder Ellington a preferable candidate to the “wild Brown” for its soft diplomacy mission in Zambia, says DeRoche. And the plan to woo back Zambia and Kaunda worked.

The Ellington visit “was a very successful event in the view of Wilkowski,” says DeRoche, “and was also enjoyed very much by Kaunda.” Two years later, Coretta King and Congressman Young inaugurated the American Cultural Center in Lusaka. That same year President Gerald Ford hosted Kaunda at the White House, bookending a chapter that began with the perceived snub of 1970.

But Brown’s influence on U.S.–Zambia relations was far from over. In 2014, the U.S. embassy in Lusaka posted images from that historic 1970 visit on its Facebook page, acknowledging its significance. Tembo didn’t need a Facebook reminder, though. Stacked under the Zambian-American professor’s desk are dozens of the LPs and CDs of Brown’s music that he has collected over the past 48 years. That relationship isn’t about to end.

By Charu Sudan Kasturi

Source:OZY

Before I get down to my own view on why politicians keep our youth in abject scarcity, allow me to steal the words of a PF Die-hard Maxwell Chongo. My good brother complained bitterly, insinuating that our youth are living in abject poverty including himself. He alleged that even those in the PF are complaining and feeling the economic stress. It was as if he was reading my mind when drafting his submission.

What is disappointing in his rantings however is the sense of entitlement the PF members seem to have regarding awarding of contracts. In his comment, he surprisingly challenges the minister of housing to work with the National Youth Executive Committee of the Patriotic Front when implementing construction projects. His whinge partly explains why we have a challenge with young people in this country. We seem to be so happy with waiting for those with the instruments of power to give us the things we desire. We can’t think of how we can make it in life on our own. Maxwell cried bitterly that most contracts are given to the Chinese forgetting the PF youths who campaigned strongly for president Lungu. .

The sad news for Max and his friends is that the PF won’t give them true and sustainable empowerment. It is in the DNA of politicians in Africa to identify talents in young people and use it for their own gain. The PF leadership will ensure that Max and friends remains in the state of poverty unless they decide to learn something from Lusaka Province Minister Bowman Lusambo. This is the only way the PF can remain in control of their youths such as Maxwell. The fear from the PF is that if the youths are given proper empowerment then the party won’t have heavies to use in 2021.

In Zambia today, we have a lot of young people who have constantly remained subjects and have failed to graduate to the level of being citizens.

The difference between the two is that a subject acts according to what they are instructed by their pay master, it does not matter whether the action is legal or illegal. A subject never asks questions WHY, they just act.

A citizen on the other hand makes an informed decision. Citizens are empowered with knowledge and material things also. A citizen won’t do something because they are being given a K50, NOT AT ALL. Every decision a citizen makes is a conscious decision based on principle. Until we get to a time when we usher into government the kind of leadership that will believe in creating a conducive environment for the young people to thrive in business and careers, our youth will continue lurching in poverty.

The current PF leadership does not have the capacity and political will to ensure that the young people in this country are lifted off the poverty data line. It seems as though the PF carried over from where the MMD left in terms of subjecting our people to poverty and yet hoard wealth for themselves and their families.

As I conclude, I wish to remind us that until now over 60% of our people live below the poverty line with circa 42% classified as being extremely poor. This figure represents just about half of our population. Due to poor health care coupled with high poverty level, life expectancy in Zambia stands at only 37 years making our country the fourth-lowest in the world.

It is therefore important that moving forward we find a lasting solution to the many challenges our young men and women like Maxwell Chongu and others are faced with. Next week we shall look at some of the workable solutions the future government can implement in order to reduce poverty in our great nation. We need to lift our young generation from entirely depending on government and begin creating wealth at personal and community level.

Lastly I wish to thank our women for being such great inspiration in our lives. To the youth, I urge you to stand up, be counted and be the change you want to see. Dare to ‘Believe Again’.

God bless Zambia

By David Kapoma