Kalaki’s Korner: The Vampire in the Room There is one dreadful underlying question about politics in Zambia – can people really change the government? Can we change the way a political party behaves when they are in power? Can we stop them doing things which most people oppose? And if we change the ruling party at an election, will they behave any differently from the party we didn’t like and threw out? When there is a big issue looming over everything, but nobody wants to talk about it, and pretends that this issue is not there, critical observers say that there is ‘an elephant in the room’. But in the political room in Zambia we have something different, and more dangerous to humans than an invisible elephant. We have an invisible vampire in the room. When we elect a new party into government they seem to be reasonable people. They listen to our grievances. They speak the language of democracy, listen to our grievances and promise to put things right. But once they go into government their behaviour changes. They may not realize it, but invisible vampires are visiting them in the middle of the night and sucking their blood. And so they also become vampires and begin to suck our blood. But nobody wants to admit it, let alone talk about it. Let us take an example. After twenty years of MMD rule the people of Zambia were completely fed up with the ruling MMD. They had come in talking the sweet language of democracy and they wore the suits of gentlemen, but the soon began behaving like vampires. They had promised us a more democratic system, but cynically played around with the constitutional reform process. They promised us freedom of the media, but instead retained government ownership and archaic laws to maintain oppressive control. They promised a civil society free of government control, but instead promulgated the hated NGO Act. They promised us a Freedom of Information Act, but instead played silly dishonest games in parliament for twenty years. By such means they retained much of the apparatus of Kaunda’s one-party state, and easily looted the treasury behind a curtain of power, secrecy and oppression. They lived like princes while they sucked our blood. So we changed to the PF because they promised to give us a democratic system by giving us a new constitution, and by doing all the things that the MMD had promised to do but had then refused to do. But what do we find after three years of PF government? Like Chiluba, they immediately found that ‘power is sweet’, and even broke their election promises more quickly, more rudely and more insolently than Chiluba had ever dared to do. Can power taste so sweet? Or is it the taste of blood? And once they have got their taste for blood, it becomes a mammoth task to dislodge them. The task is huge precisely because much of ruling party corruption has been directed at keeping themselves in power, to maintain their supply of blood. Whereas Kaunda kept himself in power by the simple method of making opposition parties illegal, under multi-partyism the strategies for a ruling party to stay in power have become more varied and less straightforward. These strategies include the misuse of government resources in elections, vote buying, ballot box stuffing, and undermining the independence of the electoral commission. This is not a civilized democratic struggle for the privilege to serve the people, this is the maniacal behaviour of the vampire hooked on blood, and willing to use any means, fair or foul, to maintain his supply. Even between elections, the thirsty vampire party bolsters its dominance and power by various strategies of institutional corruption such as sucking the taxpayers blood to feed the party vampires; using the security services to spy on and undermine the opposition; using the police and public prosecutor to raise trumped up charges against their political enemies; misusing the archaic colonial Public Order Act to criminalize freedom of expression and assembly; using presidential power for partisan appointments in supposedly independent state institutions; buying opposition members of parliament to cross the floor and join the vampires on the other side, and so on. The grip on power is tightened. The teeth are fastened deep into our jugular veins. But we all have a terrible problem in trying to discuss it. Because nobody wants to admit that there is a vampire in the room. We have no vampire vocabulary. You can attend political meetings every day of the week and never hear the words vampire, blood or suck. Instead you will hear the words democracy, representation, public interest, people’s needs, legal reform, economic growth, and so on. We talk about the independence of parliament from the executive when no such independence exists, because the president misuses his authority to appoint the speaker, and appoints his ministers from amongst members of parliament. We talk of ministers serving the people when there are forty deputy ministers with no known duties apart from receiving salaries and perks. The system of government remuneration is a system for taking money levied as taxes and distributing it amongst the ruling elite in such a way that none will ever return to the people that paid these taxes. Wealth does not trickle down. Blood is sucked up. We may occasionally hear the word corruption, but this is merely seen as an aberration that can be controlled by the marvelous Anti-Corruption Commission. There is no sense that inside the little word corruption there are a thousand other bloody words that are not known by the ordinary anaemic citizen. These words cannot be uttered because they do not officially exist. Perhaps these words are uttered by the vampires, amongst themselves, but the rest of us, living outside the ruling vampire elite, will never know. The vocabulary of ‘government of the people by the people for the people’ has no descriptive power, because that is not what we see before us. We are instead looking at ‘government of the political elite by the elite for the elite’. Elections are not about sending servants of the people to parliament to represent the people; elections are instead a site for the struggle amongst liars and crooks to gain control of the national treasury. Only when we drop the vocabulary of democracy, and instead adopt the vocabulary of vampire politics, shall we understand our problems. Understanding is the prerequisite for change. Without a vocabulary to understand the politics of Zambia, citizens stand on the sidelines like bemused bystanders. Once every twenty years, when one gang of vampires is chased, innocent citizens celebrate and imagine that democracy has finally been restored. It hasn’t. What has happened is that one gang of vampires has been replaced by another. Source: Seriously Kalaki zambiareports/2014/07/25/kalakis-korner-vampire-room/
Posted on: Fri, 25 Jul 2014 07:59:44 +0000