By Daily Revelation Editor
It takes principled people to serve in government and even in the opposition.
The frequent osmosis, where politicians keep moving from especially the opposition to the ruling party, depending on which political party is reigning at any given time is an undesirable feature that has characterised this country, and will carry on for the foreseeable future.
The late veteran politician Daniel Munkombwe ably put it when he frequently said that politics was mainly about personal benefits, where mostly opposition politicians who are in it for the benefits want to maximise accumulation of those benefits by aligning themselves with the ruling party at that given time.
Just restricting ourselves to the movements that have happened since the turn of this century, we saw how for example, many who only a few months ago were calling late president Levy Mwanawasa names before the 2001 general elections, immediately changed colours like chameleons and joined his government to work as ministers. While, some were enticed by the dangling of the carrot by Mwanawasa to work in his government as mostly deputy ministers, others were actually outdoing each other in terms of lobbying for positions in his government.
The same thing happened in the 2006 general elections, where after Mwanawasa returned office, the same people mostly from the PF, who were insulting him just a few months prior, joined to work with him when opportunities were dangled before their eyes.
In 2011, when Michael Sata’s PF won the election, even those who had sworn that he would never be president of this Republic, suddenly folded their tails and joined his government to work as mostly deputy ministers. When his successor Edgar Lungu took over and had the levers of power, notable UPND members of parliament joined hands with him. Those that immediately come to mind include Professor Geoffrey Lungwangwa, Teddy Kasonso and Mukumbuta Mulowa, among others.
Fast forward to the 2021 general elections which ushered Hakainde Hichilema into office, the trend has continued unabated, with some laundering themselves and laughing like useful idiots at the scent of power they are associating with. Today we have the likes of Robert Chabinga, Davison Mung’andu, Andrew Lubusha, among others, having already endorsed Hichilema while ‘serving’ as ‘officials from the biggest opposition political party in the country’. Just imagine!
But this should tell us something about the character of the people we elect into office as our leaders. They have their free rights of course to change their positions at any given moment. However, they don’t have the right to lie to the people about their principles and who they are, so that once they have used the people to elect them into office they change to manifest their true colours.
This is dangerous, because it means that such politicians can never be relied upon to provide effective checks and balances on the government to serve the interests of the people, as their first or only priority is serving their own belly politics first.
As things stand, there are very few politicians who can be trusted today to stand on their word, be it those from the ruling or even opposition political parties, because they can change their positions and allegiances any time. They are a very unstable people.
This also explains why the country doesn’t seem to progress even with the change of government, because those who have taken over the reins of power end up engaging in the same wrong practices the people they have taken over from were engaging in, if not worse actually. Then those who were in the ruling party and were enjoying its sweetness also end up engaging in the same ill-advised moves their former oppositions colleagues were engaging in. In the end, the country ends up going in the same circles in this representative system of governance where we elect politicians to serve our interests.
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