Let’s use 2026 to seek our good, and not tribe

By Daily Revelation Editor

We wish you all our dear esteemed readers and clients a happy and prosperous 2026. Our wish for this year is that as many of us as possible will experience an appreciable progress in our various endevours. That families will experience a lessening on the stresses which the happenings in 2025 visited upon them. That those who are working or are in business will experience an upturn in terms of gain from their labour.

It is also our hope that those who are in politics, be it in the ruling or opposition, will vie to promulgate and compete over workable ideas with the ultimate purpose of serving the greater good of the Zambian masses. We hope that as the politicians focus on that objective they will also be able to improve their own successes, especially in view of the general elections which are just eight months away. The elections must ultimately result in a win situation for the Zambian masses and democracy.

We hope to see a turn-around from the hardships the country endured in 2025. Clearly, 2025 was not easy as there were general complaints in the economy that money was hard to come by, and that even with those who had it, it quickly finished while only being able to buy a few goods.

Could the lack of liquidity in the economy be attributed to the contractionary fiscal policy the government announced that they were pursuing? It seems plausible because that policy reduces the flow of liquidity in the economy through instruments such as increased lending rates from financial institutions and hiked taxation, which has now even been extended to transactions via mobile services. But as all this was happening, there was no corresponding hike on the country’s biggest mainstay, the mining industry. The trend on this score will continue this year drawing from the 2026 budget that has already been announced.

There were general complaints from the farmers who had gone for close to one year without receiving payments over the supply of their produce to the Food Reserve Agency (FRA). The period was also characterised by historic blackouts where millions went for 21 hours daily without access to electricity supply in their homes, a situation that has only seen a drastic change over a few weeks ago, to the normal situation where Zambians are enjoying uninterrupted power supply. The change, however, seems so sudden that it raises questions whether the move is genuine or the government is engaging in electioneering barely 8 months before the elections. We are honestly skeptical about this whole scenario as we do not want to get back to those ceaseless blackouts after the August 2026 general elections.

This now brings us to the other important aspect concerning electoral promises. We urge the people to be open minded and critically analyse the tangibility of the electoral promises they will be receiving from those in government and their competitors in the opposition. We beseech the electorate to question and critically analyse the promises as a matter of urgency.

We have stagnated for a long time because we never take such citizen responsibilities seriously, as we are mostly driven by the chimwela or euphoria that characterises election seasons. When we are genuinely angry with those in power and want to remove them, we mostly get driven to the chimwela season of “change”, without critically analysing the suitability of the alternative we seek to punish those in power with. The motivation is mostly around us punishing the one in power without looking out for our own good in the replacement we seek to replace them with, whether they are really suitably qualified and patriotic enough for the task of president.

In certain times we go regional, where the ethnicity of the person we are electing takes prominence over the suitability of that individual to serve the greater public good. We surely won’t make progress as a nation as long as we allow ourselves to think tribally as opposed to approaching national matters with open minds.

In the process, some of our narrow minded politicians have exploited this unfortunate situation whereby in times when they are called to account for offending public interest, they quickly resort to ethnicity. They know that they will simply fall back on ethnicity to maintain their own support base with some of their ethnically minded and often gullible supporters. However, if tribe was the determining factor in national development, this country would have been by far among the most developed in the world.