THE "RULED" ZAMBIANS

The painful struggle that the Zambian people have to go through is to live with a perpetual hope of a change that will bring them a basic living that provides them with the basic comforts of a modern society almost fifty years after their independence from foreign rulers.

What makes a Zambian survive the squalor and the day-to-day disappointments in service delivery that he is confronted with is an escape into a hope that a single person or political party would come and address these service delivery inadequacies. They subconsciously almost discount themselves from this change and only feel their participation in it is when they cast their ballot after each five-year term.

A Zambian, especially in urban areas, seeks refuge in a mere hope whilst at the same time the happenings around him provide the opposite.

Evidently, there is a general feeling to exaggerate this hope. People are systematically made to fail to interrogate and demand for the basic services that a government should provide solely because the leadership made or makes it almost impossible for the people to have a clear channel to confront real issues that challenge them daily.
The local government system where the grass root could provide such an avenue is practically dead and if it exists is corrupt, irrelevant , unprofessional,is neglected or be-riddled with incompetence and partisan complacency.

Because Zambians do not have clear channels to directly and emphatically influence national development, they spend most of their time in misdirected petty "political " debates which usually take the form of discussion provoked by newspapers or tabloids that, most of the time, seek out mere statements from political leaders about irrelevant matters that have absolutely nothing to do with national development. This in a sense provides them with apparent entertainment and a sense of euphoria and nothing else.

This lack of proper interrogation that puts leadership to task creates a political system that is moribund and almost unaccountable to its own people. In turn, this leaves the country with very poor service delivery systems. The real politics revolve around perpetual electioneering in a five-year mandatory ruling term. Only a few projects that are donated or supervised by foreign donors are the only achievements.

As already alluded to, this scenario is mainly caused by a deliberately unstructured democratic system.

Unless there is a deliberate system or systems that acknowledges that people need services, Zambia will remain a poor country due to a poor and unprofessional leadership that cannot deliver to their people within a given mandate of rule.
It therefore also translates that the leadership have a questionable mandate to rule the country because they are not so accountable to their own constituencies.

The basic question is therefore who are they ruling for and how are they able to account to whoever they are supposedly ruling?