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       Wednesday, September 27, 2006

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ZAMBIA ERECTIONS…I.P.A. Manning

In but 12 hours or so, Joyce and Eunice, two widows with a host of children to look after - not all their own, will shut the door of their huts and walk through the dark to the polling station at the school in Chainda, Lusaka, to cast their votes for a new government. For the first time ever, this vote, this referendum for a light out of the dark, is being taken seriously. For years these two salts of the earth have had to suffer the verbal froth of politicians, their lot growing more desperate, the mouths at their pots added like beads to a string as HIV/Aids and a distant Government consign them to deeper poverty. Not that this is Somalia, where the normally effulgent rains found in Zambia is unknown, where clan brigands hold sway with the gun, where the glow of western liberal democracy is but a distant memory. But, hell, they do want change.

They want the Chinese cadre ‘erection’ supporters of the ruling party out, not the Chinese and other investors in infrastructure, mining and agriculture, but the ‘Chinee’ flogging eggs in the compounds and shanty towns, let in through some invisible process not available to the normal investor who has to suffer – and fork out, for the endless circuits of the Immigration Department at the execrable Kent House - a re-make of Vichy France Casablanca, for the Zambia Investment Centre blandishments, for the lawyers requiring a President’s ransom, for the host Ministry for what-ever, for the Banks with their forms endless, for the grasping Government departments and their harvesting civil-servants, and for the bloody speed cops sequestered in the shade but a mile from the airport, pens poised, collecting their salary…

Joyce and Eunice: no English, no skills, aging, just the good people of an old culture not yet embracing the terrible allure of the industrial age, witch bound but Christian… wanting a Government that will remove the necessity for school uniforms, that will pay the teachers and buy the books, and provide the free medicines in the clinics – not the ‘free of medicines’ clinic, that will provide a bloody house with water and a clean bog. For God’s sake!

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posted by ipam at 2:51 PM  

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