Africa-Press – Zambia. FORMER home affairs minister Lameck Mangani says former president Edgar Lungu’s defeat last year and that of Rupiah Banda in 2011 had a lot to do with the problems in Eastern Province. He says people should not waste time attacking President Hakainde Hichilema but should accept that he is the Head of State and cooperate with him.
“We have a crisis in Eastern Province. We are failing to produce a leadership that can be marketed at national level,” he explained. “We have no time to assess the type of leaders we have. If we give this one leadership, is he or she going to help us? The excitement is just to eat with them but at the end of the day we pay the price.”
Featuring on Breeze FM’s political hour programme on Saturday, Mangani who served as Chipata Central MMD member of parliament from 2006 to 2011 said Lungu did not meet people’s expectations in various ways.
“Edgar Lungu was in office for seven years but when you sit down and deliberate with the people who are able to understand politics, the reasons that made Rupiah to lose in 2011 are the same reasons that made Lungu to lose. The bigger reason is that when every person is on that seat and they forget their base it becomes very difficult. If you look at the votes that these two got, you will find that Rupiah lost because a lot of people from Eastern Province did not vote,” he said. “That time there were over 600,000 voters but only 300,000 voted and out of this Rupiah got 200,000 and [Michael] Sata got almost 70,000. If all the people in the province voted, for example if 500,000 voted, Rupiah was not going to lose.”
Mangani said Banda lost because the people in the province were not happy with him. “The people in the province were contemplating that they gave RB the seat but he did not meet the people’s expectation. Same with Edgar Lungu. He hails from here, he tried but again he did not meet the expectations of the people. If you look at the votes in last year’s elections, Eastern Province gave Hakainde 49.5 per cent and Lungu around 50 per cent meaning that a lot of people were not happy,” he said. “So, the loss of these two people, the biggest problem came from Eastern Province. This is the biggest disease here in this province and we need to sit down and reflect deeply on how such things can be sorted out.”
Mangani said the biggest problem with the politics of the province is that people who get close to corridors of power do not want to tell the truth. “We don’t want to tell the truth to the Head of State on the exact feelings of the people on the ground. We only think of ourselves because we are closer to the President without looking at the needs of the people outside,” he said. “The other thing is that we have a problem in identifying leaders. We fail to choose political leaders who can help us. When we have elections, people get confused and end up failing to choose people who can help them.”
Mangani said the PF lost the elections because its leaders abandoned the people and focused on personal business. “So, every person who came into PF was looking at making profit within a short period of time. The policy of every political party is to help the people but when you divert from this then things change,” he said. Mangani said it was strange to see leaders splashing money anyhow as a campaign method.
“From 1964 such campaigns have never taken place. This was happening because the leaders did not know what it meant to be a leader. The campaign of throwing money at the people is not leadership. It’s in fact teasing the people that you are higher while the poor are down. So, we lost direction maybe because of lack of orientation on leadership. In UNIP there was deliberate leadership training. Dr Kaunda wanted leaders to be well-informed,” he said.
Mangani said it is not enough to just stop cadreism but that people should be enlightened on why it had been stopped through civic and political education. And Mangani pleaded with Easterners to avoid past mistakes of mourning the loss elections at the expense of development.
“When UNIP lost, here in the province we spent a lot of time mourning the loss as a result we lost out on development. We thought that by being antagonistic to MMD we would achieve something instead Eastern Province went down,” he said. “When the MMD government started the privatisation process, we were outside and we had no bargaining power. My appeal is that let us be very careful on the way we run our politics because if we are antagonistic for the sake of being antagonistic, we’ll achieve nothing.” Mangani urged the people to engage leaders.
“We spent time crying over spilled milk. The people of Zambia chose and there is a President in place, Hakainde. I know others will say, I am campaigning for UPND, no. I am just being realistic. At my age I have seen issues. We were spending time under a tree. No this will happen, Chiluba will get mad. So let’s prepare but the whole five years elapsed Chiluba never went mad,” he said. “Come 1996 Chiluba won again. Such type of politics doesn’t help and in the end, we suffer. The same way, this government which has been formed, why can’t we find a better approach to engage them. President Hakainde has been preaching that he is a farmer, how much have we engaged him? You can’t say, ‘no we can’t accept him…’ But the Constitution says five [years] and so in between what are you going to do?”
Mangani said people should find a formula of engaging the government than being confrontational for nothing. He said the roads in the province are in bad state.
Mangani said the biggest problem in Eastern Province is the interface between the community and elected leaders. He said people should be careful on choosing leadership in the province. Mangani said Easterners have taken it for granted that anybody can be a leader.
“We have no time to assess the type of leaders we have. If we give this one leadership, is he or she going to help us? The excitement is just to eat with them but at the end of the day we pay the price. We need to start looking at leadership from different levels, from a serious angle. We have a crisis in Eastern Province. We are failing to produce a leadership that can be marketed at national level,” he said. “Do we have a person that we can say ‘this one’ even in Kabompo they know him, Chinsali they know him?’ All the leaders are localised. If they are localised, they are almost at the level of councillors. We have failed to develop leaders like Reuben Chitandika, Grey Zulu and Rupiah Banda. Anybody who shoots up as a leader, the first problem we have is from Eastern Province we kick out that person.” Mangani urged the people of Eastern Province to develop confidence and build each other.
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