Government Lies on Sata’s Health - Seriously Kalaki It is clear from a reading of the independent media as well as the social media, that hardly anybody believes the official government announcement that the president chaired a cabinet meeting on 14th July. Even the purported photo of the president chairing the meeting is judged to be an old photo from about two months ago. There is no need here to go into the full range of evidence to support the virtual certainty that the news item was false. The evidence has been fully explored in the online media, so much so that this present article has little choice but to treat the news of the president’s reappearance as a complete lie. This wide public perception is a sign of the new intelligence and power of the online news and social media. Perhaps ten years ago, before the rise of online media, the state propaganda apparatus would probably have succeeded with such a blatant lie. It is also instructive that the credibility of the government has fallen so low that the news item was dismissed as fake almost as soon as it was issued. This situation has arisen because the PF government has earned for itself, over the past three years, a reputation for continual and incessant lying. Almost all their election promises have proved to be false, and apparently intentionally so. For example, they have lied on the draft constitution, the constitutional road map, implementing the IBA Act, reviewing the NGO Act, and on enacting the Access to Information Bill. They have been intermittently lying about the president’s health and whereabouts for the past year until it now seems that their official statements have become one complete and continuous lie. They even lie to parliament, well known to be the most grievous parliamentary offence in any country claiming to be a democracy. They are widely known as the Bufi Government. Until recently we had seen a collection of fairly normal types of political lies, albeit of abnormal frequency, concentration and depth of deceit. We have been treated to half truths, evasions, misinformation and an extraordinary economy with the truth. But as the president’s health has deteriorated we have been treated to more bare-faced lies. There was the notorious instance of the government announcing that the president had gone to Israel for bilateral talks with the Israeli President, when in fact he had gone there for urgent medical treatment. A very foolish and inept lie because it was contradicted within three days by the Israeli government. But this latest lie has a different depth and dimension to all its predecessors. Unlike previous lies about the president, it was not a simple cover-up, like claiming that the president had gone for bilateral talks when he had actually gone for medical treatment. At least that lie had some element of truth, since at least the president had truly gone to Israel, and the only matter in dispute was the reason for his visit. But the president’s chairing of the cabinet meeting was pure fiction, including fraudulent misrepresentation of a picture to provide bogus evidence. The folly of such a lie is breathtaking. This was not a simple fraud, for instance like presenting fraudulent documents as surety to get a loan from a bank. This was a massive deceit designed to defraud the entire nation of Zambia. This latest lie was more foolish than anything we have so far seen so far, because once the reappearance of president was discovered to be a lie it has completely backfired on its authors. Whereas the reappearance of the president would indeed have restored both public confidence and government legitimacy, by the same token the exposure of the lie has done precisely the opposite. It has destroyed the last shred of the government’s credibility. The lie relied on the credulity of the people, taking us to be fools. But instead the exposure of the lie has revealed the full extent of the foolish arrogance of the perpetrators. And once the government claims about the president have been exposed as lies, people are left to speculate and to fear the worst. Has our president been stolen? Is he in the country or not? Is he conscious or not? Is he alive or not? Has there been a coup d’etat? These are not idle or hypothetical questions. The present situation provokes a strong feeling of déjà vu, reminding us of the time when Mwanawasa was brought back dead from France, a full six weeks after he had a massive stroke in Egypt. There was strong suspicion that he had died in Egypt, and was kept on ice in France until the MMD government had sorted out their succession process. Naturally, of course, people are concerned that we are entering the same scenario again. Let us make the least alarming assumption – that the president is presently incapacitated. Since the vice-president is inexplicably non-functional, then the cabinet is required, under Article 39 of the constitution, to appoint a member of the cabinet to act in his place. The deceit of pretending that the president is fit and capable was obviously intended to cover up the cabinet’s unforgiveable negligence of duty in failing to perform this crucial constitutional requirement for the continued governance of the country. In the present situation there is no acting president, and the ship of state is rudderless. If there is anybody in charge, we don’t know who that person is, and he is in that position without the authority of the constitution and without any decision of the people. It seems fairly obvious that this indecisive and incompetent cabinet cannot decide whom to appoint as acting president because it is composed of a collection of opposed factions, where the appointment of a member of one faction as acting president is opposed by the majority in the other factions who all fear that his appointment would give advancement to the particular faction to which he belongs. Instead of dealing with this problem, they instead claim there is no problem by sticking to an elaborate fiction that the president is fit and well. In so doing, they are each insolently and destructively pursing their own private political ambitions, completely ignoring their duties to the nation, to the extreme detriment of the national interest. By definition, therefore, they are not fit for office. While members of a divided cabinet are running around like headless chickens, capable of neither honesty nor useful action, they have left an unconstitutional power vacuum.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 05:58:15 +0000
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