Lessons from Madagascar on how to hold power accountable 

By Daily Revelation Editor

The President of Madagascar Andry Rajoelina this week invited various groups from civil society to hold talks in the presidential palace.

The initiative was an attempt to regain control and ease the country’s crisis amid a nationwide protest movement that has been ongoing since 25 September. 

Over 1,500 people responded to the call, including high representatives of the church, university presidents, students, youth associations, entrepreneurs, companies affected by looting, unions, medical personnel, teachers, athletes, artists and journalists.

Rajoelina assured that he would resign if power outages continued in Antananarivo in a year’s time, swearing before the crowd: “I swear before God

 I ask you for one year! I will succeed!”

He pointed to some of the ongoing energy projects which he said would be added into the electricity grid during this period, even promising to go as far as transporting the generators by plane if necessary, so that there will be no more outages in the capital  Antananarivo and throughout Madagascar.

The happenings in Madagascar are what one would describe as people power being brought to bear on their servant in the office of President.

Clearly, there are a lot of lessons Zambians can draw from how the people of Madagascar have brought the President to his knees, pleading with them if they could just give him one year within which to have the 12-hours loadshedding afflicting that nation to an end.

Contrast the happenings there with the happenings here in Zambia where people are enduring 20-daily hours of loadshedding and everything just moves on in the business as usual fashion.

In this country, the utility company ZESCO, with their enablers at State House and in government, can actually afford the luxury of changing loadshedding schedules at will without the humility of even informing Zambians about the sudden change. Not too long ago, Energy minister Makozo Chikote lied that the country would now at least be afforded the endurance of a six-hour daily electricity supply. No sooner had he finished issuing those remarks than the utility company imposed 20-hour daily blackouts, or 4-hours of supply. And those at ZESCO and in government have never even had the humility to take calls when many attempts have been made to get them to explain the lies.

Sadly, this is happening under a government that prides itself as methodical. Clearly, they do not understand the word they so much proclaim as all this chaos could not be happening if they lived up to their word. 

They are taking advantage of people’s leniency over this worst ever loading shedding period the country is experiencing. Zambians must demand a lot from Hichilema than just him apologizing and saying that he sympathies with the hardships people are going through as his own relations are also going through the same.

In Madagascar for instance, apart from the President apologizing, the minister in charge of energy there recently lost his job. However, for the people of Madagascar that simply wasn’t enough, leading to the President to actually plead to stay on office. He’s actually been forced to call for meetings with various stakeholders to address the crisis. One wonders how many meetings Hichilema has called in this country to specifically find ways of addressing the crisis here, which is actually much worse than what Madagascar is facing. 

The other good thing we notice from Madagascar is that when there is a crisis, people rise up to demand corrective measures as one. They do not focus so much on the narrow self-serving partisan interests. They understand that the problems facing them have no political identity but must be resolved by those that sought public office and were given the mandate to serve the public. If you don’t want the people to demand from you to address the problems then you actually shouldn’t be in office in the first place. Step aside and let those who are ready to be made accountable take over.