Dear Editor,
PARTY criss -crossing by most political players has seemingly reached alarming proportions by these seemingly “demagogue” politicians.
As Zambia heads towards the August 2021 watershed general elections, this shameless phenomenon will undoubtedly become the order of the day.
While being cognizant that every citizen has a fundamental right to belong to any political party of his/her choice as enshrined in the Bill of Rights, the question that baffles many political spectators is- what political ideology do such politicians represent?
For example, in South Africa one is either an ANC (Kongolosi), Democratic Alliance (DA), EFF (Commissar), UDM, etc member de-spite the prevailing political temperature of one’s party at any given time. Same goes for the Americans and the British, one is either a Repub-lican or Democrat and Conservative or Labour respectively.
But what is so different about Zambian political players? It is an issue of “bamusela kwakaba,” “nchelele bula” (politics of the belly), seek-ing political office and positions at all costs irrespective of one’s values, beliefs and ideology?
It’s in the public domain or rather we have witnessed those the at some point “raised a middle finger” to the party in government including those that had branded themselves as “die hards” of a given party in power then are today at the helm of running the affairs of our governance system through the party in power. What changed overnight? As we head to the general elections in ten months; time we the electorate ought to be not only cautious but rather be mindful of such ‘political prostitution’ failure to which we might end with the very perennial pat-tern of the same team players simply changing jerseys in the event of change of governments.
Zambia has had enough of “recycled” politicians and the hour is nigh to inject new blood, the youth, more women or alternatively the very old yet principled politicians that remain loyal to their respective parties despite where the wind blows.
RICHARD CHINGOBE, Johannesburg.
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