At the peak of political euphoria, punctuated by social media frenzy over Julius Malema’s farewell speech for Winnie Mandela, Zambia’s election strategist Kelvin Bwalya Fube seems to have heard the signal, released a book and set on a new course.
In his book ‘Zambia Must Prosper’, KBF touches on many thorny issues. But without pre-empting much ahead of today’s book launch, I will share his views on the consequences of trusting morally bankrupt people in political leadership.
KBF says a dishonest person can confidently contest elections in Zambia and win, without losing any sleep.
“For a Christian Nation, Zambia is shockingly a country that seems to tolerate low levels of integrity from its leaders. As a result, poor levels of ethics, decency and morality permeates the political, business, civil society and religious sectors alike. The shocking part is, in Zambia you can have a leader with blatantly questionable character confidently contesting and winning elections without losing sleep over it,” KBF says.
“We have morally questionable brothers and sisters presiding over churches and life goes on in Zambia. In America and other western countries, your political career is basically over should your integrity be brought into question. The principle is that people of compromised character are almost guaranteed to be compromised in their handling of national affairs and public resources. Frankly speaking, there are no two ways about it.”
KBF prods Zambians to critically examine the backgrounds of those who run for political office.
“In out country, which is supposed to be a Christian nation, it is shocking that these are non issues. In Zambia, a politician can be known to be corrupt and dishonest but his or her political career will not be affected in any way. Zambians don’t seem to mind, but it is time we understand that this has negative consequences of great nature on the nation. We don’t expect every person in Zambia to be perfect, but we expect people in leadership to be held to a higher standard for the benefit of our nation. There is no single perfect person alive today, but there is a distinction between moments of weakness, a few lapses in judgement and habitual moral delinquency. It is high time we began to examine the background of those who want to run for political office in our country to ensure we give custody of our public resources only to people of proven integrity and genuine dedication to integrity,” he says.
“It is folly of the highest order to expect people who have no integrity, who abuse their workers and spouses, are dishonest and do not display the fear of God, to become angels once we vote them into power. Zambians need to wake up from this deception and neglect in responsibility towards the wellbeing of our nation. Imagine a wolf convincing you that he will be the best custodian to take care of your sheep! But that is the extent to which we gamble with our country when we entrust public leadership to individuals of questionable character.”
KBF also talks about religion, but what he says about the church; I would rather you read it for yourself, least I pay for his ‘explicit’ frank talk.
Believe it or not, I am not really a book worm but KBF’s school of thought in the publication leaves me in suspense over why he decided to release this book at this time, and most importantly, what his political end game is.
