Hichilema’s reign: A season of relentless painful madness and corruption.
By Azwell Banda
THIS must come to an end, and very soon too. The painful economic chaos in Zambia today is perfectly reproduced in our national moral, social and cultural life. The economic collapse is perfectly mirrored in our moral collapse and political bankruptcy. Our hunger for food is also our hunger for moral nutrition, moral rehabilitation; we have never been so morally debased as we are today. Social chaos is everywhere in Zambia today.
We have become a corrupt country. Only a thoroughly corrupt country can tolerate Hichilema and his pathetic, incompetent, cruel and thoroughly corrupt government as long as we have done. The majority of us live way above our legitimate means of life. Many of us do not have any means of life at all. To survive, all of us must come to terms with the fact that it is impossible to avoid corruption.
Only an abnormal tiny minority of us have regular, full time, normal employment. And such employment does not earn those who are fortunate enough to have it enough to survive on till the end of a month. The burden of taking care of the majority of the unemployed Zambians disproportionately falls upon those with some kind of work. Personal debt oppresses everyone in Zambia today. Those Zambians struggling to keep their businesses alive do not know how long they can pretend they have viable businesses. Many Zambian businesses have disappeared beneath the weight of costly transport, expensive and irregular electricity and an extremely poor business operating environment.
Corruption – the immoral and criminal act of giving and receiving bribes – has become a way of life, the essential and necessary skill everyone needs to survive in Hakainde’s Zambia. Employed, unemployed, in business, out of business – we all cut corners to survive – corruption has become a way of life, a cultural facet of our existence. This is scary. When a morally, socially, economically and politically bad practice becomes so common that it becomes a cultural way of life, a country is ripe for a moral, social, cultural, economic and political revolution; no piecemeal reforms can uproot a deeply imbedded everyday cultural practice in a population, a people, a country.
Hichilema and his Zambia are a filthy corrupt country. This is part of the definition, the true identity, the very cultural essence, of who we have become. We no longer need politicians to tell us to register to vote: we need the voter’s card to exchange it with money, from our equally corrupt and thoroughly useless politicians. Everything about us is fake, we have fake social classes, a declassified and fake working class, a fake middle class, a fake peasantry and a fake, rotten, very tiny, useless capitalist class. We all conjugate and commune in our fake corrupt lives.
Our economic collapse and social chaos are perfectly reproduced in our moral decay, total moral depravity. Our hypocrisy and moral decadence are best exemplified by our “Christian Nation” aberration: Jesus would whip all of us into a bloody pulp if he were to come today! None of the 10 Commandments are sacred in Hichilema’s Zambia. Satan rules, everywhere.
Hichilema and the UPND are a putrid political excretion of a collapsed country. They are thoroughly out of touch with world realities, are totally removed from the daily lived realities of the majority of Zambians. They are the essence of incompetence, corruption, morally depravity, greed and extreme selfishness. They are chronic patients of pseudopodia. Today Hichilema tells us things will be better by 2027. One has to be a pathetic moron to believe anything that comes out of Hichilema and the UPND mouths.
To sustain themselves in power, the UPND need to personalise state power and bend the state apparatus to serve Hichilema, destroy our multiparty “democratic” status, kill the opposition, corrupt all state institutions, rape the Constitution, and ultimately organise violence on a national scale. It is impossible to escape the pulpable mobilisation of violent UPND party cadres throughout the country.
How are we to get out of our moral, social, cultural, economic and political corruption?
The 2026 elections, like all elections we have had, cannot cure our moral, social, cultural, economic and political corruption. Elections simply reproduce our national corruption. We need, simultaneously, a moral, social, cultural, economic and political revolution, one which will shift and transfer economic and political power away from our rotten, thoroughly corrupt, incompetent and completely discredited neo-colonial parasitic political elites into the collective hands of the impoverished masses of our people, who are the struggling declassed masses both in our urban and rural areas: these masses are yearning for a new socio-economic order, a new Zambia. Only they can bring it about.
What kind of political leadership do we need for such a thoroughgoing moral, social, cultural, economic and political revolution? They must be disruptors of our current economic and political system. They must be willing to lead the class struggle to wrestle economic and political power from our neo-colonial political and economic elites and their foreign masters. They must be ready to lead our struggle against imperialism. They must commit class suicide, be “born again” in class terms, and be totally immersed in the lives of the masses of Zambia. They must exorcise and shed all traces of neo-colonialism from their personal lives.
Such a leadership will recognise that our neo-colonial economy, legal and constitutional ecosystem and its political apparatus and practices are incapable of moving the majority of our people out of their impoverished lives, and into economic, social and political freedom free from corruption. Our current economic and political set up evolved out of the colonial, capitalist and imperialist interests of our white masters. It has now metamorphosised into a thoroughly rotten and corrupt neo-colonial set up. It was designed to, and is keeping us, permanently chained to all round poverty. We need to destroy this corrupt set up. In its place, the struggling impoverished Zambian masses need to create new state power and a state apparatus conducive to serving their interests. Only this can cure us of corruption.
Such a leadership will educate, agitate for, mobilise and organise the broad masses of Zambians to fight for food in order to regain their dignity, for shelter in order to recover their connection to their lands and for water in order to renew their spiritual connection and material ownership of their natural resources. Such a leadership will be one with the broad masses of Zambia in their everyday struggles for the basic needs they need to be alive.
It is time to accept that we have had enough of the Hichilemas and their kind of false economics and fake, thoroughly corrupt politics. All of them, in and out of government, have no solutions to our problems; they are part of our national crises. They all need to be detached from government. We cannot go on like this. It is time to end this extremely painful and humiliating insanity. (Comments to: kalindawalo2010@gmail.com)
