By Chanda Chisala, Zambia Online
Before the last elections (2001), I wrote and published an article on Zambia Online in which I predicted that the incumbent party’s candidate would win the elections, albeit by “a slight margin” over the UPND candidate. This was at a time when the newly formed FDD was very popular and many people thought it would win the elections. My email box was suddenly filled with very passionate criticisms from people who felt that I was just paid by the MMD to give my analysis in their favour, which of course is the worst insult you can grant to a person who prides himself in being intellectually independent. Obviously, the criticisms didn’t affect me at all and it turned out that I was quite accurately right in my analysis; or perhaps I was just lucky, who knows.
Anyway, this time around I decided not to take part in the “presidential debate” or even to offer my own analysis of how I think it will turn out. This is because Zambia Online has become a very strong medium in the nation as the internet has gained more popularity and accessibility, especially among the “middle class” citizens, which means one must be careful how they use such a channel when they have some sort of control over it, especially since it’s supposed to accommodate everyone.
Having said that, I have thought about my stand and I think that one also has a higher responsibility to help shape the future of one’s own country. The last thing I want is to see someone ruling this country who I completely disapprove of, but only to regret that I never did anything to stop that from happening. I will therefore do the little that I can to prevent a situation that I definitely would regret.
So here I go: Whatever you do in these elections, do not vote for Michael Chilufya Sata. Vote Mwanawasa or HH or Miyanda or just stay away, but do not vote Michael Sata (I know nothing about Ngondo, but I think he’s a joker). It is very unfortunate that this time around Sata is one of the three or two frontrunners, which is really ridiculous. I just can not understand how so many people in Zambia can forget in such a short time what this man is really about.
He hides behind his jokes and blunt humour, but the man is a completely immoral and shameless opportunist who has no moral boundaries in his pursuit of whatever he wants. If he needs to tell you silly jokes to get your votes, he will. If he needs to hack you with a machete to prevent you from giving someone else your vote, he will. If he needs to start a tribal war in order to win elections – recently he made the unbelievable statement that the presidential race will be between the ‘Bantu Botatwe’ on one side (HH and Levy) and himself (Bemba-speaking) on the other side – he will.
This is exactly the kind of person you do not want your children to grow up into, and it is certainly not the kind of man you want to take the position of the highest office in the land.
Michael Sata pretends to have some super-special answers for this nation that he kept secretly to himself all the time that he worked so obsequiously under the first two presidents of Zambia; and amazingly, people believe him! He claims that he could not implement his “great” ideas back then simply because he was not the one in power. This is the first sign of the man’s great dishonesty. It is one thing to work under another president who can not implement your ideas, but it is quite another thing to sing praises to what that president is doing, and saying it is the best for the country when you “know” it is not.
Michael Sata used to praise Chiluba at every opportunity for what he was doing and even went as far as aggressively advocating a change of constitution to allow him a Third Term of office. If now he is saying he was actually against what Chiluba was doing, except that he could not be heard, then why was he praising him and why did he want him to continue on and on? So that he could continue doing the wrong things (including high taxation) that were making the people of Zambia (whom Sata loves so dearly) suffer so much?
Would a man who wants to deliver the people from suffering advocate the continuation in office of the man who is making them suffer? Unfortunately, many people in Zambia have the memory of a housefly: it lasts only a few seconds; and they will vote for him because they are unable to see beyond the range of the moment into the full context of the man’s life and career.
The duplicity of Mr. Sata’s character appears even in his policies. He has this impossible mix of policies that can only deceive a person who is unable to think in integral wholes. Mr. Sata has on one hand, a policy of very low taxes (within 90 days) and on the other hand, another policy of improving the lives of the poorest people by building them modern houses, also within 90 days (besides giving jobs to all unemployed nurses and teachers, increasing the salaries of all teachers, policemen, students, etc). If you take these policies separately, they are technically possible and doable, but not if you try to integrate them.
Mr. Sata is relying on the failure of people to think by integration, a mental weakness he also clearly exhibits. Just as he has seen that they cannot integrate his current moral claims with his past thuggish record in UNIP and MMD, he knows they won’t be too serious about integrating his economic policies either. Or maybe he sincerely believes in these ideas, which is even more frightening.
Why is it impossible to integrate his two wings of economic policy? Because they are mutually exclusive if you take them the way he is presenting them. Or to put it very simply, you can not have your cake and eat it. Any political party in the world that advocates lower taxes naturally also advocates less government expenditure (and size). You lower people’s taxes so that you can enable them to build their own houses from their higher savings – not so that you could build their houses! Mr. Sata is advocating both low taxation and high government spending, which can’t happen because government gets money from taxes.
Sata’s answer to this dilemma is that the low taxes shall produce such a booming economy that he will be able to spend even more as he collects more taxes in total. In principle, it is true that low taxes should create a booming economy (as I’ve always advocated), but it is impossible to implement a policy of low taxation when one is promising to increase spending at the very same time. What would be possible is for one to suspend all these high social expenditures for a while as the low taxation policy leads to productive prosperity and budget surpluses: but there is always a time lag, and the time period is not 90 days or anything close to that.
Mr. Chiluba, his former boss, also sincerely thought that if he privatized the companies and did one or two other things, the economy would immediately boom. And when it didn’t happen, he decided to do what he knows best: he ‘rigged’ the economic results of his policies! He brought in a few investors with special incentives signed at State House (which is already a bad sign), thus leading the poorest Zambians to practically subsidise these big multi-million dollar corporations; this was not capitalism, it was gangsterism. It takes time for any economic policy to translate into a real increase in productivity and higher growth rates through increased investment, and when one is impatient due to absence of intellectual conviction, one can start reversing that positive process with short-term counter-productive tactics.
Even in the United States there is still a huge debate over whether Clinton’s prosperity was a result of his own policies or of the pro-growth productivist policies of Ronald Reagan some years before him. Reagan had implemented the low tax policies but did not see the projected resultant budget surplus during his two terms of office; in short, the government did not raise as much money as he thought they would raise from the multiplier effect on the reduced taxes. But when Clinton came into power, a huge budget surplus also came and this confused so many economists that they called it the x-factor in the economy; there was nothing in Clinton’s policies to deserve such prosperity. The simple explanation is that some policies take some time to produce their full effect and Reagan’s policies only had the effect on the budget surplus later, even though the rise in productivity started almost immediately. You might have valid disagreements with this specific example, but what you can’t deny is that there is always a time lag between policy implementation and results because of so many other factors that need to adjust to the new policy, and during that time, fiscal discipline is more than critical: you can’t just build houses for people with impunity.
Sata, on the other hand, has this incredible dream that within 90 days, the tax reduction would attract such huge investments that he will still be able to collect enough money to engage in his socialist spending policies within that same period (he even explicitly calls himself a socialist and he has expressed his ardent admiration for Fidel Castro and – please hold your breath – yes, 1000-percent-inflation-man Robert Mugabe - himself!). Even if the man is sincere, we must not endorse his sincere ignorance. It’s a tragedy when educated people use their minds to rationalize their support for such ignorance instead of simply calling a spade a spade.
Unfortunately, even some very highly educated people like Dr. Guy Scott are lending credence to this nonsense; they have sold their souls to the devil just to have a last taste of some sweet power in their older years before they die.
Guy Scott is even encouraging Sata’s ignorance on the issue of China. Recently, he reproduced an article in the Post (from an English writer) that discussed how China is supposedly destructive to African economies, to show that Michael Sata is not the only one with a skeptical attitude to China. I am not a big fan of China myself because of their human rights record, but the claims being made by Guy Scott and Sata on Chinese impact on Zambia’s economy (specifically) is steeped in either ignorance or intellectual dishonesty, or perhaps in a genuine disability to integrate facts – for which
Guy Scott (at least) should not be forgiven.
It would probably shock these two if I told them that China is affecting Zambia’s economy more positively than any other nation at the moment. And it would shock them even more if I told them that the little money that China has gained from investing in Zambia is just a small fraction of what Zambia has gained from China! But to realize this, you have to be able to integrate more than two things (in just a few logical steps), a skill which is apparently the mortal enemy of Mr. Michael Sata’s mind as we have already seen.
China’s recent ambitious drive to build its industrial and economic infrastructure has led it to make a huge demand for certain minerals that it doesn’t produce, one of them being copper. That’s step one. Step two is that Zambia produces a lot of copper which it sells through the London Metal Exchange and which still drives its economy. The high demand for copper by China is what has made copper reach the highest prices in the commodity’s history in recent months. The rest is easy: this high price largely explains how the Zambian Kwacha appreciated by such a high margin against the dollar over the last year (and not some covert deal by MMD and the banks as Nevers Mumba said, or some other conspiratorial economic trickery, as Guy Scott alleged in his column).
Facts are facts.The impact of the Chinese economy on the Zambian economy is therefore very explosive and it is projected to continue for a very long time to come, way beyond our next president’s term of office, whoever that might be. In the globalised economy, you do not calculate the impact of another country’s economy on yours by simply looking at one little factor and ending there. You might just bite the finger that’s (literally) feeding you!
Dr. Roger Chongwe has also endorsed Michael Sata’s candidature by saying it doesn’t matter whether a man is highly educated or not to be in leadership. I do not respect formal education myself because it doesn’t always guarantee intelligence or integrity (just look at Guy Scott), but a man must be highly educated in one way or another if he is to take such an important position of leadership, especially in this era of globalization where one must be able to integrate different dynamic relationships before making critical policy statements. Mr. Michael Sata is indeed a hard worker, as he has already proved, but the presidency also requires (imperatively) that one be a thinker, even minimally.
So God help Zambia.
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