Fri, 22 Sep 2017 12:41:50 +0000
IT is nonsensical and actually treasonous for UPND president Hakainde Hichilema and his lieutenants to claim that extra judicial killings are taking place in Zambia.
Do they know what extra judicial killings are? These are killings ordered by the government outside the judicial process. Who has been killed in this manner?
It is very sad and alarming that Government has failed to mount a robust rebuttal of this very injurious and highly misleading campaign of the prevalence of extra judicial killings in Zambia.
Nobody has been killed on Government orders and indeed our country has never descended to the levels of lawlessness that the opposition has painted to the world.
Our country is a haven of peace and citadel of stability which has provided shelter and succor to many in the region and beyond who have fled from instability and political violence.
It is therefore a great disservice that even when the country is marching forward as exemplified by the President’s speech we have printed in the middle spread pages, some Zambians have nothing positive to say about the country.
It is very sad that events of the last general elections are being used to propel and embellish an image of Zambia as a country on the cusps and verge of political implosion. This cannot be further from the truth. This is political opportunism of the worst order.
Political opportunism has been described as an attempt to maintain and increase political support and influence in a way that totally disregards relevant ethical or political principles and realities on the ground.
Niccolò Machiavelli better described political opportunism as a political style of aiming to increase one’s political influence at almost any price, or a political style that involves seizing every and any opportunity to extend political influence, without any moral or ethical consideration.
In essence, political opportunism is acting in a selfish and egocentric style in which the politician seeks to make political capital of situations by expedient manipulation guided primarily by self-interest motives.
It is excusable for intellectual midgets like Chishimba Kambwili to make ill-informed, outrageous and obnoxious statements but totally unacceptable for intelligent and well educated Zambians so suggest that there is a breakdown of the rule of law in Zambia, let alone the outlandish suggestion that Zambia is experiencing extra judicial political killings.
Extra judicial killings in Zambia? What arrant nonsense. And yet this is the propaganda that has been and is being disseminated to win sympathy. It is even the more reprehensible that this nonsense is coming from a party that is responsible for gratuitous violence, coming from a party that has recently maimed PF cadres who are nursing serious injuries in hospitals. We have published pictures of these victims.
Extra judicial killings are unlawful of felonious killing specifically ordered by the government outsider the judicial process. No such killings have been ordered in Zambia. UPND President Hakainde Hichilema must be put to strict proof to disclose where such killings have taken place and who ordered them.
Examples of extra judicial killings are replete in the Philippines where the government has launched a vigorous and aggressive fight against drug trafficking. Scores of people have died.
Equally Latin American juntas waged a relentless campaign of disappearances and executions to eliminate opposition. This was extra judicial killing as a policy. In Russia and other parts of the world journalists have been killed for their professional convictions.
The government must begin to challenge patently misleading statements that are either uttered in areas of privilege, social media, print media and other fora which are known purveyors of lies, innuendo and calumny.
