PRESIDENT Rupiah Banda says the opposition is de-campaigning itself by castigating Government for mobilising funds to develop roads.

He trashed allegations by the opposition that his recent directive to the Ministry of Finance and National Planning to mobilise funds for roads development is a political ploy aimed at rigging elections.

“To me, those are non-issues and the opposition are just de-campaigning themselves,” Mr Banda said.

He said this yesterday at City Airport on arrival from Katete where he went to campaign for MMD candidate in the Milanzi Parliamentary by-election, Whiteson Banda.

Mr Banda said he could not give a directive for development programmes because it was impossible for him to foresee the by-elections in Milanzi and Mufumbwe Constituencies.

He said there is no way he could give directives for development programmes based on the by-elections, adding that he pities the opposition, which he said is panicking.

Mr Banda said the Ministry of Finance initiated one of the programmes included in his directive over a year ago.

“In fact, people should be happy with such projects. There are several programmes that are taking place countrywide in areas that are not undergoing by-elections,” he said.

Mr Banda said one of the roads extends beyond Mufumbwe and cited the Chipata-Lundazi and Kasama-Luwingu as some of the roads that are being rehabilitated.

And the President said he is confident that MMD will retain the Milanzi seat which fell vacant following the death of Reuben Banda of the ruling party.
He said his campaign trail in Milanzi was good for the MMD.

Mr Banda said people of Milanzi received him and his delegation well and that big crowds attended the MMD rallies.

He said the people appreciate MMD programmes relating to construction of new roads and schools.

Minister of Information and Broadcasting Services Lieutenant-General Ronnie Shikapwasha and Secretary to the Cabinet Joshua Kanganja and the defence chiefs received Mr Banda at the airport.

By Chanda Phiri-ex microblogger

Watching the first British prime ministerial debate on BBC world on DSTV, I was left with one question in my mind. How can our National Constitution Conference (NCC) delegates get it so wrong and appear archaic and backward in the way they have shredded the Mung’omba draft Constitution?  How in the world has Zambia spent so much money to allow a small  group of people to produce an archaic document and claim that it will stand the test of time?  It is really amazing to see what a rotten system can do to even the best minds.
There are a lot of vital clauses that the NCC has shredded and I will reserve them for a future blog by others more capable  than me, but today, I have an issue on one of them and let me upack it. To begin with let me quote a story on Lusakatimes on Saturday, January 16, 2010 titled “NCC rejects articles aimed at making MPs vulnerable to recall”

“THE National Constitutional Conference (NCC) has rejected articles in the Mung’omba draft Constitution which would subject members of the National Assembly to a recall when they are not performing to the expectations of their electorate.The conference voted unanimously to have Article 188 and Article 189 deleted as they could promote anarchy in the country….”

Please note that this was a unanimous decision and all political parties are guilty of this crime except perhaps the Patriotic Front which is not taking part in this public spectacle.

This is what the the people whose forefathers gave us the kind of constitution the NCC want to perpetuate had to say in a live Debate when asked how they intended to re-establish the credibility of MPs in the eyes of the electorate, after all the scandals.

… I want to do three things to change the system. First of all, I want to give the right of recall to constituents. If your MP is misbehaving and is guilty of corrupt practices and parliament doesn’t act, you should have the right to recall that MP. The second thing we’ve got to do is give people the right to petition parliament so that your issues can be raised in parliament and that’s what we propose to do. Thirdly, and this is quite fundamental, and I don’t think David will support us on that, but I hope Nick will, we’ve got to reform the House of Commons and the House of Lords. We need a new House of Commons, a new House of Lords. We will have a referendum to elect members of parliament with more than 50% of the vote, and to have a House of Lords that is elected rather than hereditary or unaccountable. These are the changes we need…”- Gordon Brown, British Prime Minster

“Listen, none of this will make any difference if we allow this rotten system in Westminster to carry on where MPs have jobs for life, where they basically only need to get 20, 30% of your votes in their areas, then no questions asked, they don’t even need to bother until the next time there’s an election. There is a direct correlation between the hundreds of Labour and Conservative MPs who have got these safe seats, these jobs for life, and the levels of abuse in expenses.”-Nick Clegg leader of the Liberal Democrats

These are touch words uttered by people who have realised how flawed the system they have dumped on their former colonies has caught up with them. I say this because our constitution despite many changes still at the core reflect the traits of the one we inherited. People fail to realise that the colonial system was meant to disadvantage the locals and our politicians are using the same instruments to disadvantage anybody who does not sing their songs. In Britain one would argue that their system was meant to disadvantage those who were not in the elite circle. ( I know I will be attacked on this one, I swear, but sorry I have issues with Monarchs)

Thanks to the Zambian public for being way far ahead of their British Counterparts. They picked up on this problem long time ago and made sure that the Mung’omba draft Constitution had measures to curb such abuses.

What is upsetting is for the NCC to eat our hard earned taxes and shred what the people wanted and give us an archaic document. How can they be so wrong in this age of abundant knowledge and common sense. I bet most of these law markers have employees in one form or another. Are they telling us that if any of them gave their employee a five year contract and that employee stopped performing, would they continue to pay his or her wages? This is really common sense stuff and why can’t they see it?

[pullquote]MPs, the President included, are employed by the people. And if they are not performing, the people have the right to fire them even before the contract expires. What is evil and anarchy about that?[/pullquote]

MPs, the President included, are employed by the people. And if they are not performing, the people have the right to fire them even before the contract expires. What is evil and anarchy about that?

I have seen the economic indicators of our economy and they are good. But lets not mistake them for our good governance because they are nothing to do with the greatness of our leaders. They are all to do with China’s GDP that has kept our copper prices high. China’s GDP is 60% construction and I smell another housing bubble in the works and if that happens, God forbid, the copper price will nose dive and there will be no growth to talk about for Zambia. All the Infesters, oh sorry Investors will flee and all we shall be left with is our people.

That is why it is paramount that we invest in our people and the first step is a right constitution that will create fairness, equality and liberate our people to compete on the world stage. The World is flat and the world market is open to all and it is only the well prepared and motivated people who will take advantage. Zambians can compete with anybody anywhere in the world given an equal platform and it is incumbent upon our politicians to ensure that they deliver this for Zambians. True freedom and fairness. These two can unlock the potential of our entrepreneurs.

There are small countries like Israel that don’t have resources and yet what they have archived by just investing in people is extra ordinary. A must read book for our leaders, if they ever read, is a book by Dan Senor and Saul Singer, called Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle.

In conclusion, our valuable resource is our land and our people. We need to educate them, we need to free them from petty people holding our generation down because they want to protect their mediocre standards. Our children will no longer just compete with our next door Kasai neighbours in the north and Zimbabweans in the South. They shall be competing against the world!

The Patriotic Front (PF) has announced that it will hold its long awaited National Conference in November this year.
PF Secretary General Winter Kabimba said the party would start electing leaders at constituency level next month.

He said this was in line with the party’s democratic tenets of ensuring that party leaders are elected to ensure that transparency prevailed.

Mr Kabimba explained that the party would then move on to hold elections for leaders at district level in June this year.

He said the provincial leadership would be elected in July after which the party will start organizing itself for the national conference in November during which the party’s top leadership including the president will be elected.

The PF Secretary General said those agitating that the Patriotic Front should show how democratic it is by holding its national conference should now be contented because the party is on course to holding its convention.

Some political parties allegedly led by the ruling MMD and some civil society organizations have labeled the Patriotic Front as an undemocratic party for not holding its national conference since its formation in 2001.
[ QFM ]

Researchers say they’ve found the most religious place on Earth — between the southern border of the Sahara Desert and the tip of South Africa.

Religion is “very important” to more than three-quarters of the population in 17 of 19 sub-Saharan nations, according to a new survey.

In contrast, in the United States, the world’s most religious industrialized nation, 57 percent of people say religion is very important.

“On a continent-wide basis, sub-Saharan Africa comes out as the most religious place on Earth,” said Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, which released the study Thursday.

According to the survey, 98 percent of respondents in Senegal say religion is very important, following by 93 percent in Mali. The lowest percentage was reported in Botswana, 69 percent, which is still a healthy majority.

“That begins to paint a picture of how religious sub-Saharan Africans are,” Lugo said.

The study is part of the Pew-Templeton Global Religious Futures Project. More than 25,000 sub-Saharan Africans responded in face-to-face interviews in more than 60 languages.

While the study confirms that Africans are, indeed, morally conservative and religiously pious, researchers explored a variety of topics, including religious tolerance, polygamy, the role of women in society, and political and economic satisfaction.

Islam and Christianity dominate as the most popular religions in the region — a stark reversal from a century ago when Muslims and Christians were outnumbered by followers of traditional indigenous religions.

But for the past 100 years, indigenous spirituality has been diluted as missionaries carried Islam and Christianity throughout the African continent.

The study reports that the number of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa grew faster than the number of Muslims, from 7 million in 1900 to 470 million in 2010. One in five of the world’s Christians lives in sub-Saharan Africa.

While a majority of African Muslims are from the northern region of the continent, nearly 234 million live below the Sahara Desert.

Indigenous African beliefs have not disappeared, but are often incorporated into Islam and Christianity, the report found. A number of sub-Saharan Africans believe in witchcraft, evil spirits, reincarnation and other elements of African spirituality. More than half of the people surveyed in Tanzania, Mali, Senegal and South Africa believe that sacrifices to ancestors or spirits can protect them from harm.

Mary Dhavale, a native of Tanzania who now lives in Atlanta, describes herself as a “righteous child of Jehovah God” and drives two hours every Sunday to worship at a Pentecostal church. She also said her grandfather was a traditional healer.

“You may call him a witch doctor, but he did good things for the people,” Dhavale said.

Dhavale’s grandfather attended Catholic services for most of his life, even as he concocted herbal drinks and crafted charms to ward off evil spirits or expose petty crimes in the neighborhood.

“If your child is sick or if your car is spoiled, people would go to my grandfather and find out who did it,” Dhavale said.

Such syncretism of religions is not uncommon in Africa.

Sulayman Nyang, a professor at Howard University’s African Studies Department, said by honoring traditional religious practices, sub-Saharan Africans are able to maintain their African identity and strengthen ethnic unity.

However, Nyang said indigenous religions are not practiced in a pure form because Africans want to maintain their “dignity” and “want to be accepted into the new world of modernity.”

According to the Pew survey, most sub-Saharan African Muslims are Sunni. Within Christianity, Catholicism dominates in Guinea Bissau, Rwanda and Cameroon, while Liberia, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Nigeria, and Botswana are predominantly Protestant.

Pentecostalism is rapidly spreading and deeply influential across the region, and also across Christian denominations.

“Casting out of the devil or evil spirits, high degree of apocalyptic expectations, the health-and-wealth `prosperity gospel’ is the new Christian phenomenon of the Pentecostalism in sub-Saharan Africa,” Lugo said.

The study suggests that the degree of concern about religious conflict is often interwoven with concerns about ethnic conflict. In Rwanda, for example, tensions between Hutu and Tutsi tribes erupted in the 1994 genocide. Nigeria continues to be wracked by Muslim-Christian violence.

The 19 countries represented in the survey comprise 75 percent of the population of sub-Saharan Africa. The countries are: Botswana, Cameroon, Chad, Djibouti, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Senegal, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

[Christianity Today]

The opposition United Party for National Development has accused government of deliberately poorly planning the Milanzi and Mufumbwe Parliamentary by-elections in order to manipulate the electoral process.

Party spokesperson, Charles Kakoma said preparations ahead of the forthcoming elections have been recklessly handled and that government is to blame.

Mr. Kakoma cited the controversy surrounding the printing of the ballot papers as one such indication of poor planning.
He said the ballot papers would have been printed within the country but government has deliberately decided to print them abroad so that it can easily manipulate the process.

Mr Kakoma said his party seriously suspects manipulation in the entire process leading to the by-elections. But AVAP executive director, Bonnie Tembo has defended the Electoral Commission of Zambia’s preparations ahead of the by-elections describing them as satisfactory and up to standard

He however says there are lessons to be learnt from every election process and that as the nation looks forward to the 2011 elections,it is imperative that everyone is open minded.

He also calls on stakeholders to play their part and not just leave it to government if the election process is to develop to the quality standards required.

QFM