Manda

teapawt.net/ssishuwa/status/200052… There are two major political processes or developments that are happening quietly and simultaneously in Zambia at the moment. The first is the executive-driven dismantling of the formal guardrails and norms that have long kept executive power in check, and whose weakening risks eroding public trust in democracy and the use of the ballot as the best mechanism of changing governments. The constitution has been repeatedly flouted, parliament now serves as an extension of the executive, much of civil society and elements of the private media are co-opted, opposition parties have been crippled, the courts are subservient to the executive on all political cases in which the president has an interest, and elections are increasingly meaningless. The president has carried out this destruction of the vestiges of autonomy in all state institutions outside the executive arm of government with considerable ease, impunity, and skill (albeit of a criminal variety), for the purposes of establishing an authoritarian regime and a slide into a fearful dictatorship. The second is the systematic and carefully planned capture of the state by elites from one half of the country — what I call the Zambezi region — who now occupy key roles in the leadership of the executive, judiciary, legislature, electoral commission, security forces, public universities, civil service, police, and other alternative sources of authority and power. At the heart of this ethnic-regional agenda or vision in motion is the pervasive belief, shared by many of the Zambezi elites, that “our real enemies are Bembas and easterners and we should do whatever we can, now that we are in charge of government, to lock them out of State power while using some of them as useful idiots”. The passage of Bill 7, the gerrymandering that took place recently through delimitation, the ongoing eleventh-hour changes to the electoral law, the forthcoming electoral exclusion of relatively stronger rivals to the president (using the captured courts, the Registrar of Societies, and the electoral commission, and secret deals with some opposition candidates who are plants of the State and won’t be on the ballot as a result), and the unexplained secret recruitment of people who may be ruling party supporters for training as police officers (these may later be deployed as “polling agents” or “returning officers”), are all part of this long-term strategy to capture the State. The immediate objectives? To win the forthcoming election by any means, create a defacto one party state, and then move to change the Constitution to either remove or extend presidential term limits, or abolish the presidential vote so that the president is chosen by MPs (meaning the ruling party since Zambia will be a one party state except in designation) rather than directly by the people. Sadly, many Zambians will only see what is happening now long after the fact. It saddens me greatly to see what is happening to the country and how the educated elites have betrayed the common people for both short term personal gains and narrow ethnic-regional agendas. As the 2023 article below illustrates, one that was at the time challenged by the Zambezi elites, I have spent the last few years trying to sound alarm at these two processes or developments but have often been misunderstood. africanarguments.org/2023/06… One day, many will come to understand what I meant when, immediately after the passage of Bill 7, I wrote that “Well, it's now official. The Zambia that we knew is gone. We lost it today. To suicide. The coming era will be a long dark road. You may not understand now, but one day, you will.” Let time. Many things make themselves clear in the fullness of time.