Christmas greetings and New Year message from Socialist Party
It’s very difficult to separate Christmas from the new year festivities because of their closeness to each other, the joy and the hope of a better and redeemed life they both bring.
We are coming to the end of a very difficult year for our country and our people, especially the poor.
The challenges, happenings and experiences of this year have taught us that we can try to evade reality, but we cannot evade the consequences of evading reality.
The consequences of our over borrowing, unbridled corruption, irrationality and wastefulness in public expenditure can no longer be concealed or denied.
The economic and financial decisions of the current rulers of our country were clearly not motivated by the desire to achieve, but by the desire to enrich themselves, to beat the opposition and keep themselves in power forever and ever.
The events of the year we are about to close have also taught us that reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it and we shouldn’t count on them; we should just leave them alone. They have refused to accept reality and to be moved by it. The hardest thing to explain is the glaringly evidence which everybody had decided not to see.
But as we open the new year, 2020, we the citizens of this beautiful country must accept and take responsibility for all that has happened or not happened – good and bad.
As the late Josef Brodsky, Russian-born poet and Nobel Prize winner, wrote, “A free man, when he fails, blames nobody.” It is true as well for us as citizens of this country who, finally, must take responsibility for the fate of the country in which we ourselves have chosen to live.
We must learn to value ourselves, which means: to fight for our happiness.
The wrong or bad things that have gone on in our country were made possible by nothing but the sanction we give them. Such wrong or bad things require the sanction of the victims.
We have been aptly warned by Ayn Rand who wrote: “Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favours – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.”
In the coming year we will need to make a very big change in our approach and mindset if we are to see a reversal of fortunes in this country and in our lives.
Our problems cannot be solved by the same level of consciousness that created them. As Thomas Sankara said, “You cannot carry out fundamental change without a certain amount of madness. In this case, it comes from nonconformity, the courage to turn your back on the old formulas, the courage to invent the future.”
Confucius wrote, “Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
We can’t wait when immoral and selfish elements are turning their corruption into policy and rolling back the rights that generations of Zambians fought for and heroes died for.
Let’s make 2020 a happy and year of revolutionary change!
We wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy 2020!
Issued by Fred M’membe on behalf of the Central Committee of Socialist Party
Garden Compound, Lusaka
December 22, 2019