Let Us Reject Prof Clive Chirwa Outrageous Contract Demands

By Nyalubinge Ngwende

They say if you want to pay peanuts, employ monkeys! But Professor Clive Chirwa is not such a one among the primates; he is an educated fellow, with not just academic excellence but the practical skills and innovative ideas that the Patriotic Front President Sata thinks will help to inject new life into our railway sector and get our locomotives engines rolling back in a much modernised way.

ZRL CEO Prof Clive Chirwa

According to his ‘white talk’, to borrow the meaning from white paper, Prof. Chirwa intends put on our rails supersonic trains, jetting on solar power through underground tubes that take your journey during day into bowels of the earth only to eject you at the anal of the other town in a jiff. Can you pay such a fellow peanuts? No, I do not think so! 

It is now in the public domain that he is being paid Kr248,000 (K248 million) per month, which is the budget of running half the country’s high schools in six months), sits in an executive cottage that costs Kr72,000 (K72 million) and, among other things, and some astronomical figure in gratuity every two years while demanding a 25 percentage cut of shares in the Zambia Rails Limited at the end of his contract.

To the Professor this is a modest demand that was approved by the government and far below what he was getting in UK engagements.Is this really modest pay?

ZAMBIA: NO NEXT DAY IN POLITICS

Our body politic has lost morality; it has been infiltrated by shameless, selfish individuals masquerading as leaders. They are pathetic charlatans, who have turned our politics into a means of personal welfare rather than providing service for the good of society.

By Nyalubinge Ngwende

It seems in this country there is no next day in politics, and advancing political issues in the opposition is no longer seen as a noble cause but a diabolical curse; inimical to national interests. As such, being in the opposition seems to be an irritation that is very hard for most of our politicians to endure. Opposition politics means less of being an alternative government in waiting than a fairytale.

The next day of Zambian politics is always one that has become synonymous with defections from the opposition to the ruling party, with those MPs and cadres, who are defectors, justifying their actions by all sorts of fables. Some reasons that are advanced are so annoying that one would wonder where politicians with right morals and good sense of reason have gone, to leave us seeing and listening to this despicable fraud.

Populist Politics, Economic Policies Are Hurting Zambia

Good standards of governance and economic policies do not just happen; they need to be designed with greater thought crafted into unwavering statutes that exudes the spirit of a nation. The differences in political ideologies should not take new regimes to pulling down what others before them took time to build and to a large extent, apart from minor defects, has been working so well for the country. 

By Nyalubinge Ngwende

How would we know that political parties in Zambia are committed as partners in the political processes to enhance the democratic and economic growth of this country, other than a rush of blood to their heads for a day in government? And when that day arrives, how are we going to be sure that the best thing politicians will do is not to start pulling down everything that their predecessors left functioning well just for political expediency?

It is known that political parties come into government on platforms which they believe in and they are going to use to organise the economy. But in this country these platforms are marred by lack of principles, they follow a trajectory of ill personalized decisions and party patronage at the expense of the general good. This is not new with the Patriotic Front government; it is an observed fact.

In fact Zambia has suffered reverse in development because the forbearers who have gone before this generation did not lay out a strong foundation on which the future of this country was supposed to be built. Instead, they respected to safeguard against progress by inculcating and promoting ideologies that subordinate all institutions of governance and the electorates to the executive and political patronage. Worse still even successive governments have taken a path of doing development of populist politics, taking on unintelligent (or intelligent, but rushed) measures to please their supporters.

Welcome to Sata’s Rule by 10 Commandments

For Sata the commandment:  

‘thou shall not worship any other God, apart from your creator’ 

seems to mean to rule without others, but by his decisions and wisdom.

By Nyalubinge Ngwende

President Sata has fascination for religious symbols

On Good Friday, April 29, 2013 President Sata kissed the crucifix in memorial of the execution of Jesus Christ. It was not a surprise for the President to show off his fascination with the Christian faith in the glare of national television cameras. He knows such excites the people to believe he is pious; only shame is that the same mouth he kissed the crucifix with has wrongfully accused and judged others.

In fact one of the laughable, yet implicating decrees, Sata made to the nation after assuming office was to declare "I will govern by 10 commandments". People applauded and daily papers ran headlines, without seeing the proclamation as exclusionary, whose objective is to subject his political rule to the divinity of Christianity and God. He bestowed on himself the agency of representing the heavenly rule in Zambia; giving his government a special relationship with God. 

It is not something laudable; it has far reaching implications to democracy. Subordinating political rule to the relationship with God is inimical to the promotion of genuine and free political thought.  Religion discourse is not subject to second opinion which is a virtue in political governance and, by any chance, if Sata manages to convince the citizens to accept that his 10 commandments rule is alright with them, does his actions really stick with these virtues?

The Patriotic Front Must Also Indict Itself

“Those who think Kabimba is right to prosecute Banda should ask oneself how they would feel, as individuals, to stand in the former president’s shoes and stare in the face of jail based on punishment that will be inflicted, not by a general rule, but arbitrariness of the Patriotic Front finding itself to be in government and having influence over the justice system”

By Nyalubinge Ngwende

Zambian Former President Rupiah Banda

The Zambian Parliament on Friday, March 15, 2013 lifted immunity for its former President Rupiah Banda for alleged corruption. Banda, who lost power to the Patriotic Front leader Michael Sata in September 2011, had his immunity stripped off by an 80 to 3 parliamentary vote so that he could be amenable to criminal prosecution. He becomes the second Zambian former president under the MMD government, after Fredrick Chiluba, to lose presidential immunity over corruption charges. 

Banda faces allegations of corrupt acts related to the funds he used to run, what the country’s ruling party PF considers the most expensive presidential election campaign in the country’s history. He also faces a Nija-Oil-Gate Scandal in which government paid US$2.5 million for 44,000 barrels of fuel to be supplied on a daily basis, but the proceeds of fuel sales allegedly went to Singapore in a Barclays Bank account belonging to his son, Henry. Another charge relates to a loan procured from a foreign company for a real estate trust, Mpundu Trust, by first lady Thandiwe Banda.  

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