Tag: education

    Job creation under the Socialist Party government

    Job creation under the Socialist Party government Featured

    May 11, 2023 by Socialist Party Zambia in

    The Socialist Party (SP) will create employment once voted into power with a job-creation strategy centred around the three pillars of its social and political programme; education, health and peasant agriculture.

    Under the SP government, schools will not be run the way they currently are. We will provide free education from nursery at the age of three all the way to university, and it will be compulsory up to grade 12.

    Education will be a major undertaking in this country and will be allocated not less than 25 per cent of the national budget. Under this programme, teachers will not be left to manage and run schools on their own. In order to have an effective, efficient, and orderly system, the running of schools will include other professionals and a broad spectrum of workers, such as human resources personnel, information technology experts, accountants, marketing personnel, cleaners, drivers, mechanics, gardeners, nurses, clinical officers, and catering staff, among others. Schools, colleges and universities will need to be supplied with all sorts of teaching aids and other goods and services, and these will be produced in factories by our people, meaning that education will directly and indirectly be one of the biggest employers.

    The health sector will also be used to create a number of jobs. By expanding Zambia’s health services – both in terms of quantity and quality – we will need to employ more people. This will entail a need for more nurses, clinical officers, doctors, pharmacists, radiographers, and many other health and general workers. In addition, our government will prioritise the manufacture of some of the medicines we use, even under licence. We will also need to create factories producing health equipment of all sorts. This, together with many other functions that will be added to health services, will create many more jobs.

    Another sector that we will prioritise to create employment is peasant agriculture. And when we say peasant agriculture, we don’t mean that everyone will be carrying a kambwili, hoe and be tillers of land. There’s an urgent need to transform the way peasant agriculture is carried out.

    We cannot increase agricultural production with a hoe, that’s for planting flowers around your house and a few beds of vegetables to feed a small family. Our plans are much bigger than that and will involve many jobs being created in the agricultural sector because of the transformations we will make.

    Transformative peasant agriculture under this government will need new equipment, that is; appropriate ploughs, planters, harvesters and other necessities. To produce these, we will need to set up factories all over the country employing engineers and their technicians, human resources experts, accountants, IT experts, marketing and sales staff, drivers, mechanics, nurses and clinical officers to ran staff clinics, catering people to manage the staff cafeterias, and so on. Of course, our reality, as it stands today, is that we may not have all the engineering expertise required to set up and run these factories. We may have to rely on expatriate skills while we train our people in our schools, colleges and universities.

    We will also need to set up factories producing agricultural chemicals. These will require us to employ a diverse range of scientists and other staff. In addition, we will need to create factories that produce veterinary medicines for our livestock. This undertaking will employ scientists, technicians, HR people, accountants, ICT experts, marketing and sales experts and many others. The medicines produced will need to be administered by vets, working with lab technicians. In this way we will be creating more and more jobs for our people.

    And, of course, peasant agriculture will need to be financed. This will require us to create a myriad of financial institutions, such as agriculture banks and insurance companies. These institutions will employ bankers, lawyers, accountants, IT experts, insurance personnel and many others, again creating more and more jobs.The agricultural output produced by our factories will need to be delivered to our peasant farmers. This will create logistics jobs for drivers, mechanics and other support staff. Furthermore, the cotton we produce in Nyimba, Petauke, Katete, Chipata, Chadiza, Lundazi, Chama and other places, will not leave Eastern Province unprocessed. Textile factories will be established in employing people from all over the country in many, various roles. These factories will be producing reels of all sorts of cloth, but the cloth produced will not be exported as it is.

    Clothing factories will be created to design and produce shirts, trousers, dresses, caps, canvas shoes, belts, and many other products. These factories will require sewing machines and needles so small factories will be created to manufacture and service the machines. The clothing factories will further need buttons and zips. The buttons can be produced from the horns of cattle, hard wood and stones, creating even more jobs. And the finished products will need to be packaged. This will require us to create factories producing packaging materials. Drivers will be needed to transport the finished products from the factories to the ports of Dar-es-Salam, Walvis Bay and Durban. Furthermore, delivery trucks will need to be serviced by mechanics. In this way, more jobs will be created.

    Our strategies on cotton production and its processing and export will be extended to food crops. Small and large factories will be created all over the country to process agricultural produce. For instance, factories can be built to process tomato into jam, juice, soup, puree or paste. Some of these products can be exported, and some consumed locally, resulting in more jobs. In addition, it is important to also mention that there will be new jobs created in other sectors of our economy, such as mining, construction, forestry, and the provision of the many other services needed in an organised society.

    Fred M’membe

    Zambia needs a new type of politics

    Zambia needs a new type of politics Featured

    May 29, 2021 by Socialist Party Zambia in

    Over the next eleven weeks, you will hear, from my opponents or competitors, how our country is flourishing, how happy we all are, how we trusted our government, and what bright perspective are unfolding before us.

    I didn’t accept to be the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party so that I, too, would lie to you. Our country is not flourishing. Zambia is 123rd in the overall Prosperity Index rankings. Since 2010, Zambia has moved down the rankings table by 12 places.

    A country once proud of its educational standards now spends so little on education that it ranks so low in the world. Our country which used to rank so low on the corruption index today is among the world’s most corrupt nations.

    Today we live in a highly contaminated moral environment. We have lost our values, principles, standards and common aims. We learned to ignore each other, to care only for ourselves. In Zambia today love, friendship, compassion, equity, justice, solidarity, fairness and humility have lost their depth and dimensions.

    When I talk about the contaminated moral atmosphere, I am speaking about all of us. We have all become used to a corrupt and intolerant system and accepted it as an unalterable fact of life, and thus we help to perpetuate it. None of us is just its victim; we are all its co-creators.

    We urgently need a new type of politics based on morality, principles, values, standards and common aims. We need to teach ourselves and others that politics should be an expression of the desire to contribute to the happiness of the community rather than of a need to cheat or rape the community. Let us teach ourselves and others that politics can be not only the art of the possible, especially if “the possible” includes the art of speculation, calculation, intrigue, secret deals, and pragmatic maneuvering, but that it can also be the art of the possible, that is, the art of improving ourselves and the country.

    We have a duty to struggle for a more just, fair and humane society. We should dream of such a Republic.

    Fred M’membe
    President of the Socialist Party

    Our education!

    Our education! Featured

    April 8, 2021 by Socialist Party Zambia in

    Underdevelopment is, among other things, lack of learning and lack of the possibility to learn. It is not only how many cannot read and write. It is also how many cannot read or write, or pass on to higher levels of education, due to the lack of teachers, schools and the minimum conditions beyond those most elementary for subsistence. That is why our dramatic educational and cultural problems cannot be isolated from our overall socio-economic situation.

    A characteristic of illiteracy is that it is greater in our rural than in urban areas, and among women than among men.

    It is not by chance, however, that the geographic and social distribution of illiteracy is almost the same as that of poverty. Illiterates are, as a rule, also the poorest, the most poorly fed, the least healthy, the most disadvantaged and exploited. The illiteracy figures reveal the frustrated development of human capacities and potential; the limitations on the individual as a human being and as part of a community; exploitation and ignorance as to a better future; the dramatic social effects of underdevelopment; loss of national identity; social and economic backwardness.

    Many of our children today lack schools or the means and possibilities to attend school.
    The rational behind this reality and its cause is the situation of poverty that forces them to drop out of school, the distances that have to be covered to get to school and the deplorable material conditions of many of the schools.

    Another factor to be borne in mind is the insufficient training of teaching staff and the lack of ways and means to remedy this insufficiency, which has its effect on the limited and poor quality teaching provided. To add to an already gloomy situation, there is the number of university graduates that are lost every year due to the brain drain of the major capitalist powers.

    It is imperative to stress another aspect that hampers our efforts in the pursuit of education and cultural development. Imperialist mass media are continuously, sometimes subtly and sometimes openly, carrying out a process of ideological and cultural penetration aimed at eroding our cultural identities, creating habits and patterns of conduct foreign to the needs of our people, belittling and deforming our people’s cultures in their own eyes. This, of course, has no bearing on the flow of ideas or on the legitimate exchange of the products of their cultures among peoples. These very mass media are working to create a consumerist image devoid of all rationality and are trying to impose mesmerising illusions on our people as absolute truths. An enormous percentage of the television programmes broadcast today in our country come from developed capitalist countries.

    Fred M’membe
    President of the Socialist Party

    April 8, 2021

    Socialism is not a complicated concept – Dr M’membe

    Socialism is not a complicated concept – Dr M’membe

    October 13, 2020 by Socialist Party Zambia in

    FRED M’membe says socialism is not a complicated concept.
    Meanwhile, Dr M’membe, the Socialist Party president, says he cannot be a burden-bearer for President Edgar Lungu.
    Dr M’membe featured on Hot FM radio’s Red Hot breakfast show on Tuesday, October 13, 2020.
    He explained that socialism was simply giving a dignified life to citizens.
    “Socialism is not a complicated thing as people try to make it. It’s not about bombastic words, bombastic concepts. Socialism is simply giving a dignified life to our people, by providing them with services that make life dignified,” Dr M’membe clarified.
    “Our priority will be to give our children the education they need. So, we’ll socialise education and make it free from nursery, at the age of three, all the way to university.”
    He asserted that a better society, in the modern world, could not be built with uneducated people.
    “It’s not possible!” Dr M’membe argued.
    “The more a woman gets educated, the lesser and lesser infant mortality rates you have, because they are able to look after children better. So, it will be compulsory for every citizen to go to school up to Grade 12.”
    Dr M’membe added that under a socialist-oriented government, “the adults who are illiterate today, within two years, we’ll make them literate.”
    “We’ll have a huge literacy campaign, which we have already started….” he said.
    He also explained that Northern Rhodesia (Zambia) had been on the current capitalist path since 1891 when Cecil Rhodes and his company, the British South Africa Company (BSA), colonised the territory.
    “We have been on that path to this very day from 1891. We know what capitalism has done to our country. If capitalism had succeeded in this country, there would be no need for any other system. There would be no need for socialism,” Dr M’membe noted.
    “But capitalism has not only impoverished our people but it has also killed.

    By Socialist Party reporter

    Dr M’membe urges Zambians to invest in research

    Dr M’membe urges Zambians to invest in research

    September 21, 2020 by Socialist Party Zambia in

    The Socialist Party says it shall prioritise agriculture among other key sectors once it forms government following the 2021 general elections.

    Speaking on Let The People Talk programme on Radio Phoenix Tuesday this week, party president Dr Fred M’membe said the Socialist Party once voted into office will pay a lot of attention to agriculture as it was one of the three key pillars to its developmental agenda.

    “The biggest priority comes from the biggest challenge that we face, what is the biggest challenge today? I told you we are the fourth hungriest country in the world today, whatever we want to do if we are not able to feed our people we will have challenges, we will not even have the type of human beings that we want to have, a health human being is what we need to have, so we will pay a lot of attention to agriculture,” said Dr M’membe.

    Dr M’membe explained that apart from agriculture the party shall put development premium on health and education as they were complimentary to each other.

    He expressed concern that Zambia today had an agriculture sector that was not been informed by research.

    “We don’t have research that is going on in agriculture seriously. Take for instance, rice production; I have heard people talking about how nice Mongu rice is, how nice Nakonde rice is, but that rice you can’t sale it anywhere in the world, it’s of a very inferior quality, its substandard rice. We have not spent money to research on rice. The last serious research on rice was in Sefula in Mongu, Western Province by JICA in the early 80s and since then nothing has happened,” he said.

    Dr M’membe added that the country needed to invest in research for agriculture.

    “If you go to Thailand today, a leading country in rice production, you go to the University of Bangkok, there is a Faculty just dealing with rice from Bachelor’s Degree to PHD, just dealing with rice production, you can’t compete with Thai rice. Our rice can’t compete with that rice. There is investment in it and Thailand is ripping huge benefits from rice globally, just look whenever you go, you find Thai rice. Bangkok alone has more than 200 varieties of rice,” said Dr M’membe.

    And Dr M’membe said it a was a joke to hear a lot of Zambian leaders talking about fish farming. He noted that while a lot of money has been wasted in aquaculture industry no meaningful research had been done to justify or support such investments. He further noted that the research on fisheries being conduct at Zambia’s universities was not adequate.

    “I have been to all institutions of higher learning, my doctorate research is in fish farming and I have moved from Chiyawa to Kalulushi looking at all the fish ponds that are around as a researcher, I have moved to all the producers of stock feed for fish, I have moved to all the institution that have something to do with fisheries, we are not there and am a fish farmer, I had 11 fish ponds but they were a disaster under the guidance of the Ministry of Agriculture. There is very little, which we can get from fish farming unless we invest in fish farming research,” charged Dr M’membe.

    He said there was a lot the country was not doing well and urged Zambians to invest a lot in researching.

    “We have been growing beans in Mbala, Nakonde, Isoka, Mafinga and other parts of Northern and Muchinga provinces. What research has gone into beans production? The quality of beans is diminishing, we have grown it for a very long time without any research, our beans cannot compete with Brazilian beans,” he said.

    He said the country was not even producing enough beans to feed the nation.

    “we don’t even have enough beans to feed our own people and beans is not needed just for human consumption, it is also needed for livestock as you can produce stock feed from beans, there is a lot of things which you can do from beans,” Dr M’membe.