It’s crass dishonest to claim that President Edgar Lungu is a blessing and has brought good to Zambia.
This claim is wrong because it agrees neither with facts over the years of Mr Lungu’s presidency, nor with the social facts, statistics so far known to us.
The rural poverty under Mr Lungu’s reign is 76.6 per cent. The three poorest provinces of our country – Western, Luapula and Northern provinces – have poverty levels of 82.2 per cent, 81.1 per cent and 79.7 per cent respectively.
Our maternal mortality rate is 213 deaths/100,000 live births; infant mortality rate stands at 56 deaths/1,000 live births; our physicians density or doctor ratio is 9 doctors/100,000 population; and we have a death rate of 11.6 deaths/1,000 population. Is this the good, the blessing Mr Lungu has brought us?
Let’s learn to argue with facts, figures; let’s learn to have a head for figures. That is to say, we must attend to the quantitative aspect of a situation and make a basic quantitative analysis. Every quality manifests itself in a certain quantity, and without quantity, there can be no quality. To this day many of our politicians still do not understand that they must attend to the quantitative aspect of things – the basic statistics, the main percentages and the quantitative limits that determine the qualities of things. They have no figures in their heads and therefore cannot help making mistakes and wrong conclusions.
The truth is the history of humankind is one of continuous development from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom. That is what dialectics teaches us. And this process is never-ending. In any society in which classes exist class struggle will never end; and the struggle between truth and falsehood will never end.
Zambia’s problems are complicated, and our brains must also be a little complicated.
Today our population is 17,426,623 (July 2020 est.) and at our current population growth rate of 2.89 per cent (2020 est) in the next 15 years our country’s population will more than double. What will life be like for doubled Zambian population in 15 years in terms of food, water, sanitation, housing, education, health, transportation and so on and so forth?

Fred M’membe

Garden Compound, Lusaka