A recurring nightmare
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Morbid. Very morbid.
ONLY about a month ago, I said the following: ‘Soon, the heavens will open and rain will begin to fall. What is a veritable blessing for mankind will soon be the very reason many people’s lives will be terminated.’
Diarrhoeal diseases are common in Zambia. They account for the top ten leading causes of morbidity and mortality.
This clearly shows that Zambia is an unclean and filthy country. It solidly illustrates just how under-civilised or backward this nation is.
These diseases include cholera, dysentery and typhoid.
And just as I predicted, cholera has broken out in Zambia, and just as I predicted, lives have again been lost from this disease.
Sad. Very sad.
It ought to be said that an outbreak of cholera, for instance, is a reflection of failure. A cursory profile of victims of cholera quickly reveals the origins of the problem.
Most, if not all its victims come from poor neighbourhoods, unplanned settlements.
They come from areas that are not suitable or designed for human habitation.
The underlying problem is poor water and sanitation. The problem then is that of human development.
Yes, cholera is an infectious disease. Nonetheless, it is a disease arising from a bigger disease, one much more fundamental.
It is a manifestation of a cranial lack, a disease of vision and governance. Poverty of the mind at governmental level is its lead cause.
Human settlements ought to be a result of careful and deliberate planning. It is failure by local authorities to engage in this required activity which eventually sets the ground for the outbreak of diarrhoeal diseases.
First and chiefly, cholera is evidence of failure of personal hygiene at the level of the individual. Filth kills.
Second, it clearly illustrates failure by a government to establish, implement and sustain an existential framework that survives and thrives citizens.
You can tell the level of civilisation of a society by observing patterns of order, or lack thereof, within that society.
Contrary to the firmly held belief of backward and under-informed Cabinet ministers from both present and past governments, cholera is NOT caused by street vending.
Street vending is commerce. Street vending is entrepreneurship.
Street vending can grow national income. Street vending can transform lives.
Vending, being entrepreneurship, whether of the street kind or otherwise, thrives families. It increases the per capita income of any nation. It ends poverty.
It is a reliable source of legitimate income security both at the household and national levels.
Properly organised, as I will illustrate, it can constitute a significant source of national tax income.
All that vending requires is regulation and the required infrastructural support.
Vending should be legislated for and promoted. It prospers nations.
Street markets of the required architectural designs should be created by local authorities. Construction of these should follow careful planning and should be overseen by council building engineers.
Each street vendor should be registered. Each vendor should also be colour-coded both in terms of identification cards and uniforms/aprons depending on the goods and services that define their business.
Each vendor should then have specific knowledge and skills capacity built within them.
For example all vendors must be taught basic taxation and cash flow management. They should also be taught basic banking and hygiene.
Those that deal in foodstuffs should be pre-screened by health authorities to ensure food safety and that no carrier of infectious pathogens handles food. Following such assessments, qualifying street vendors would then be issued with the requisite food handlers’ certificates.
All vendors ought to have a tax payers’ identification number [TPIN]. On a daily basis, each vendor should then, through mobile money platforms, pay tax directly to the Zambian government through its revenue authority.
This is how, with a national database of say one million street vendors, the Zambia Revenue Authority [ZRA] would then collect K5 million daily at K5 tax/levy per vendor per day.
Recording growth on the income side of the national budget, this then would make the blood pressure of Situmbeko Musokotwane, Zambia’s Minister of Finance to fall down and normalise. He would begin to smile.
This then is how you bring the informal entrepreneurial private sector on board into the registered economy. This then is how you broaden the tax base and increase national income.
With this income, public ablution blocks, hygiene and sanitary facilities [toilets and shower cubicles] for the same street vendors, and for use by the general public, would then be strategically built on the streets, further buttressing, enhancing and entrenching human behaviour which promotes public health.
With this income, a primary school for the education of over 5000 children at a time, children of the same street vendors, a vital life-changing piece of infrastructure which would last forever, would then be built from local and sovereign resources every four days.
And with rising education levels in the community, over time, say a generation, street vending, as a practice of commerce, would naturally and significantly reduce and cease to be the problem it is seen to be today.
Of course street vending should and would never completely go away.
As of 17 September 2025, Zambia had recorded about 174 cases of cholera. Two had died from it.
Cholera is a cultural issue. It is a reliable indicator of the civilisation and developmental phase of a people.
Cholera, like typhoid and dysentery, is a disease of poverty.
It is a disease of backwardness, a shameful thing or occurrence in any home.
Many people erroneously think that cholera is solely the responsibility of the Ministry of Health. This view is flawed.
Cholera is a multi-sectoral challenge, a reflection of a warped societal order.
Look carefully at it. Cholera is merely an effect of developmental acts of omission.
At the governmental level, when cholera breaks out, this reflects failure of the ministry responsible for water. Access to clean and safe water by citizens keeps cholera at bay.
Lack of or poor country and town planning, whose mandate it is of the Ministry of Local Government and Rural Development, is a key predisposing factor to the outbreaks of cholera. Challenges of waste management and drainage systems remain a leading concern.
Cholera is a clear indictment of failure by the department of government responsible for sanitation.
Poverty, which denies citizens the required building blocks for personal hygiene, is supposed to be ended by proper economic recovery planning from the Ministry of Finance and National Planning. Presently, our economy is moribund and further going south.
Zambia’s economy is only doing well for Zambia’s bond holders, its creditors. It has been structured that way.
For nearly every Zambian, the economy is a hell-hole of torture, pain and suffering. It is a fast lane to death.
Fact is, under the current national administration, the United Party for National Development [UPND], both the cost of living and poverty have worsened. It is therefore not surprising that Zambia today is still facing one of the worst housing, hygiene and sanitation crises in its history.
When an economy is doing well, people feel it.
They rejoice, and not swear or gnash their teeth. They do not wait for statisticians from ZAMSTATS to read figures from their cheat sheets.
Abandoned by their government, currently, Zambians are in tears. Both the intensity and frequency of their praying have increased.
To a large degree, the Ministry of Health, which really presently is a Ministry of Diseases and Recovery Facilities, though it often shoulders all the blame for disease outbreaks, its role is mainly reactionary, primarily to treat and control the outbreak of the disease.
Note that the total budget for managing the health of Zambians goes beyond that at Ndeke House.
Perception change is required at Cabinet level to successfully attain the set health indicators of the country. It takes more than a Ministry of Health to keep citizens healthy.
To expect the Ministry of Health alone, with its current institutional framework, to meet all the health needs of Zambians is like pissing in the wind. It is a delusional national mind-set.
So far, this Ministry of Diseases and Recovery Facilities, though limited in its reach, is also failing to play its current and primary role which is to save citizens and control the disease outbreaks.
Just in the last 14 days, two Zambians died from cholera.
Truth be told, no one should die from cholera.
Cholera, like all faecal-oral diseases, is both preventable and curable.
But then one of the saddest things happened last year. Utterly gut-wrenching.
A health worker died. Under the watch of the UPND, a nurse was lost. A gallant citizen, on duty and in service of her country, died.
Under-paid but brave and committed to duty, at the frontline of the fierce battle against cholera, diligently battling to save other human beings, though she succeeded in doing so, she lost her own life.
A nurse died. A saviour gone. A soldier of health. A warrior of light.
It is also imperative that the government informs the people what steps, what measures, it has now taken or put in place to avoid such loss of life in the coming months.
Just how many more Zambians will needlessly die in a few months’ time when the rains start to fall, when hygiene and sanitation become a headache?
As Bob Dylan laments in his legendary song Blowin’ In The Wind, ‘How many deaths will it take till he [the leader] knows that too many people have died? And how many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn’t see?’
Dear reader, cholera and its mortalities are a recurring nightmare of failed states.
Cholera is a reliable yardstick for measuring leadership and community management or its absence.
Just look for cholera anywhere in the world, and I will show you a poor, backward and failing community, a people badly in need of an upgrade.
Though your health is your responsibility, from the foregoing, it should now be clear to you, dear reader that the leadership responsibility for safeguarding the health of citizens and against cholera squarely lies with the Republican President.
The buck stops with him.
Outbreaks of these diarrhoeal diseases are a terrible, mortal stain on his reign and leadership.
Cholera or its absence, is a more reliable indicator of his performance than what any graph or pie-chart could show.
This then is what happens when the wheels fall off the governance wagon. When leadership fails, disease emerges, festers, and lives are then lost, and families collapse.
Cholera occurs only when a person swallows food or water contaminated with faeces having the culprit germ.
Just picture that!
But then, dear reader, note that not all infectious diseases occur naturally. Some of them are artificial, deliberately caused.
Cholera, for instance, also occurs when a people’s water system is deliberately contaminated by State or non-State actors motivated by a given end.
Disease outbreaks can constitute a national security threat. They can arise as an act of war, economic or otherwise.
In shady hands, Cholera can be weaponized.
So then, every time an outbreak occurs, the question must be asked. What is the real cause of this outbreak?
Questions must be asked, and answers given. Is this outbreak really an act of nature or not?
For example, you might ask. Is it caused by the State to stifle political activity, to unite the country under one cause in the face of growing national and ethno-driven divisions?
Is it deliberately started to reduce growing tension in a country emanating from participation exclusion, growing poverty and an ever skyrocketing cost of living?
Or is it just a gimmick to reduce voter turnout in a targeted given election area?
Or is it a marketing prelude to the introduction of a new health product on the market?
Is it trade or economic sabotage by enemies of the State?
We must ask.
For each effect, indeed there is a cause. We must seek, for we know that we shall find.
And when we know, we shall have power. It is only then when we have power shall we adequately prepare and be ready for the next disease onslaught.
Has it been started by enemies of Zambia to further wreck our already ailing economy? Is it a veritable act of war?
The Serotype of the responsible germ must be known? Is it new, a variant or still the same one endemic to Zambia?
And when an outbreak follows the mass administration of a vaccine for the same disease, as was the case last year, the red light must go on. Was the vaccine its seed?
Citizens need to know the answers to these and many other questions. Barring this, our national security will remain vulnerable and, under clear and present danger.
As a matter of national strategic importance, the Zambia Intelligence and Security Services [ZISS] needs to have an appropriately-staffed and well-equipped department of bio-vigilance.
This ZISS department should anticipate, thwart, investigate and collaborate with other State agencies to correct all threats to Zambia of a biological nature.
As a measure for disease control, to order or urge Zambians in urban human settlements to relocate to villages to avoid cholera, or faecal-oral diseases in general, is not only callous and uncouth, it is also not in keeping with the expected utterances of any leader. It is lame and only exposes the emptiness in governance value of the one who issues it.
Such an utterance is incongruous and unethical, akin to cracking jokes and laughing at a funeral. Similar to mocking a widow when mourning. I am sure you understand.
Whether in a rural or urban setting, safe and clean water should be accessible by all citizens. Whether in a town or village, all people should have hygiene and sanitation facilities.
Besides, they say that you can take a person from the village but that you cannot take the village from them. This adage is akin to the British one that says, ‘a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet’.
Yes, a fool is a fool regardless of his location.
Hygiene is a basic requirement for all people everywhere.
Instead of moving people around, shifting the problem from one area to another, all unplanned human settlements, as a matter of national development priority, as a sustainable solution for human health and wellbeing in Zambia, should undergo the required upgrade.
Dear reader, before eating or swallowing anything, all citizens should follow the following maxim, adage, and no one will catch cholera, dysentery or typhoid or any other faecal-oral disease:
‘WASH IT. PEEL IT. BOIL IT. COOK IT. WARM IT. TREAT IT. OR LEAVE IT.’
Yes, granted, we remain a primitive, backward people, mentally altered and crippled by time and colonialism.
We are a people stripped of identity and pride, requiring mental liberty and restoration.
Yes, we shall turn our pain into power.
We know that those who suffer the most, those who face many difficulties and overcome through adaptation, are the ones, so tempered and refined, best able to lead.
We are such a people.
This then is our inevitable destiny – self-determination and prosperity – ever reflecting the magnificence of our Maker.
The journey may be long. The struggle isn’t easy. But both are worthy.
In the end, as a people, we shall get there. That our default settings as a people will be restored is inevitable.
This backwardness then is only transient. An existential phase. We are a people on the move. We are heading towards glory, magnificence and Majesty.
That which we envision, we shall become. A free people. Prosperous and altruistic. Majestic.
The real image of God.
Yes, sometimes, it is when imprisoned that we find freedom.
Aluta continua! Vitoria è certa!
Godspeed!
Send your comments to: bandacanisius@gmail.com
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