What Fr Mukosa said is nothing but honest truth

By Daily Revelation Editor

Council of Churches in Zambia (CCZ) General Secretary But Fr Emmanuel Chikoya has denounced the recent summoning of Catholic Father Chewe Mukosa, even without an arrest, saying it was aimed at intimidating the other clergy

“And so he gave a very clear message about Good Friday. Good Friday was a day of hardship and things like that. Aren’t the people of Zambia passing through hardship? Yes they are. Isn’t the cost of living high? Yes, it is. Do we have climate change challenges? Yes we have. But we were promised better,” Fr Chikoya said. “We were told emphatically, climate change and all these other things are going to be there but why we were having problems in the past, and very crude words were used that time, that there was visionless leadership, foolish leadership and all those things. And so we need to make sure that we allow preachers to preach without gagging them.”

Fr Chikoya said Zambians were promised that during this current UPND administration, the matters mentioned were things that would be resolved and that there were recordings to that effect.

To put it in context, Hakainde Hichilema is the one who denounced his many predecessors as visionless during the years he served as an opposition leader, saying he was different to them all and would handle national matters better. Even with climate change which affected the country on several occasions leading to outages, Hakainde boasted that all it required to end all this was leadership at that time.

Well, Hakainde is the leader of the country today having been given a strong mandate of almost 60 percent vote in the 2021 general elections. He is in office today and the same problems he alluded to lack of leadership are still besetting the country today, with Zambians enduring the harshest 8-hour load shedding every day. Are they right to argue that this all is happening on account of visionless on his part? Going by his own judgment when he served as an opposition leader, they would be justified to say so.

Like Fr Chikoya says, Hakainde made a lot of promises to Zambians including the fact that he would reduce the cost of fuel and the high cost of living through his Y-C formula. He denounced his predecessors on the cost of mealie-meal but is actually now presiding over the highest mealie-meal prices in the history of the country, with a supersonic rise in the cost of the staple commodity having been noticed under his reign, from the average K130 to over K320, with the lowest price for a 25kg bag now going for a very high K230.

For the fuel, Hakainde promised Zambians that he would remove middle men so that the price could come down to less than K12 per liter. But every Zambian remembers that among the first acts of his administration was to increase fuel prices from K17 to K21, and the price has only gone further up since then to the highs of K34.19 before coming down to K31.12. He denounced his predecessors over the high prices in electricity but today Zambians are being punished with the highest electricity connection fees. And fertilizer has not come down to K250 from the K750 he promised to reduce it from, but it has escalated to over K1000.

The Kwacha he said would supersonically appreciate on his coming to office because of investor confidence in him has weakened further than he found it. It has even gotten higher than the K23 it got to during the PF administration. Please note, he found the Kwacha at K17 to US$1, now it’s over K25 to the United States Dollar.

The Fr Mukosa who was summoned for condemning load shedding and the high cost of living, alluded to the same. It was actually stupid to have summoned him in the first place, even if the police this time felt ashamed with themselves for doing just that and backtracked.

We therefore agree with Fr Chipoya for saying all this was aimed at intimidating and sending a message to the others to ‘behave.’