By Daimone Siulapwa
UNITED Party for National Development (UPND) has it all to make a good President. Just like Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe, Anderson Mazoka and Dean Mung’omba, three Presidents that Zambia never had.
Owing to various circumstances, they never made it to Plot One. Without discussing what those circumstances are, one hopes HH does not fall into one of those situations.
Hearing HH speak, one can tell that he has it all. He clearly has a vision of where this country should go, he knows the mistakes that have been made and how to correct them. He may not get fair coverage in certain media houses, public and private, but he is certainly a person who is liked even by those who may not necessarily vote for him. If you bring the three presidential front-runners, HH, Michael Sata and Rupiah Banda, to a debate, he will definitely outshine both of them.
From one, you may get generalizations on how to solve the economic situation of our country, from the other, you will probably get comedy, but from HH, you will get the real deal.
Clearly, HH is the envy of most people, and rightly so. He has had a successful career with a short period of time. Others try to link him to the privatization of the mines to dent his image, but he was just doing what all of us would have done in his position.
Still, in politics, there is what is called timing. And the entry of HH on the political front may have been wrong timing. The way he succeeded Mazoka will always haunt him. But that he can sort out. It’s a mistake he made, and his name was dented.
However, his current mistiming in politics is his joining the Pact. He risks his image being dented again. They will pollute his name to an extent were people will start believing all the lies his enemies will be preaching, all the signs are there to see right now. It has always been said that birds of the same feathers fly together, what do we have here….I personal don’t know.
HH should leave the Pact and start preparing for 2016. Like it or not, the UPND-PF Pact died the day it was born. Here is a case where two parties, deeply polarized, decide to go to bed together. The purpose is to solely remove the MMD from government. The justification for them is that people want change. Maybe!
Still, it has now emerged that their respective members are not entirely in agreement going by the recent statements that we have been witnessing in the media. The desperation for power made Hakainde Hichilema and Michael Sata to forgo all the fundamentals that go with such an arrangement.
For a long time, Sata had campaigned on tribal lines. He thought he could win a national election using tribal blocks. Well, he nearly did when he made former President Frederick Chiluba and Levy’s corruption fight as issues in 2006. He campaigned that the corruption fight was targeted at Bemba’s.
But after he lost to Rupiah Banda in the Presidential by-election in 2008, he realized that there was no way he was going to win an election if he does not court the support of other tribes, which in the past, he had disparaged, hence his decision to go into a Pact with the UPND. It is all for selfish reasons and narrow interests. If it was not, they would have revised their policies to meet each other half-way. But upto now, we do not know what the Pact stands for other than avoiding dividing the opposition vote in an election.
Unfortunately, HH did not see this.
Now that it has emerged that there is little sincerity on the part of their partner, it is time he changed tact. Although they refuse to accept, it is a fact that the UPND is the junior partner in the Pact. So naturally, if the so-called Pact was to win an election, the UPND is likely to be given the Vice Presidency and a few Ministerial positions. Whether they can influence policy in this scenario is doubtful
The thinking though would be that Sata will only rule for a term and then give it to HH on a platter. But knowing Sata, and how sweet power is, that is unlikely to happen. In case you have forgotten, it would not hurt to refresh the memory.
The Sata we are talking about is the same who presided over the expulsion of more than 22 Cabinet Ministers and senior members of the MMD at the height of the third term debate. Reason, he wanted to clear his own path for the presidency in the MMD. Unfortunately, he did not know that he was dealing with a political engineer in Chiluba who dribbled him at his own game by bringing in an outsider, Levy Mwanawasa.
Well, and from the time he formed the PF, he has had four secretary-generals, all of whom he has differed with the exception of Guy Scot, whom he promoted to the position of party vice president. Well, and in the PF, there is no democracy, everything starts and ends with Sata. He appoints and disappoints any time he feels like it. Well, GBM discovered this recently when he was relieved of his party duties by Sata without affording him an opportunity to be heard. No matter how ghastly GBM efforts on his wife were, he should still have been afforded an opportunity to be heard by a disciplinary committee before he could be suspended. That is what is called justice. But it seems Sata is yet to come across that term in his 73 years on earth. He was the prosecutor, jury and judge in the GBM case.
And this is the person HH wants to go to bed with. Hell no, the King Cobra is too dangerous.
HH has to pull-out and start building for the 2016 elections. After all, he is young, educated, articulate, rich, handsome, and has time on his side.
The UPND as a party has a lot of quality in its rank and file in comparative terms with the PF. Sata on the other hand, has differed with all fairly intelligent and independent members of his party such as Dr Peter Machungwa, Joseph Kasongo, Faustine Sinyangwe, Elizabeth Chitika and Rev Sampa Bredt among others.
HH may be thinking that it will be difficult to undo the party’s tribal tag and thus spread its support beyond the Southern province. But if there is one thing late party president Anderson Mazoka proved, it is the fact that it is possible to give the party a national character. Sata as the MMD national secretary then tried to label the UPND tribal, but Mazoka proved him otherwise, balancing his national management committee with persons like Patrick Chisanga, Bob Sichinga, Love Mtesa, Sakwiba Sikota and Ben Tetamashimba among others.
HH should seriously start building the party nationally now with an eye on the 2016 general elections. Otherwise, if he is depending on the Pact to take him to plot one, he will be very disappointed. You cannot certainly trust Sata on this one. Before he realizes it, the UPND would have been obliterated from local politics by the King Cobra’s machinations. He will never be treated as an equal in the pact by the PF.
