Quarterly Bulletin

The problem of corruption manifests itself in many different forms such as grand corruption (at large scale) mainly caused by government officials and has great consequences for the nation. In this article, Lawrence Kamanga, a student at St. Dominic’s Major Seminary, relying heavily on insights from Edem Djokotoe and Pamela K. Chama’s book, “Show Me the Money: How Government Spends and Accounts for Public Money In Zambia” (2006), reflects on the widening gap between the rich and the  poor that is caused mainly by  misappropriation of public funds.

Suffering as a general phenomenon is caused in two ways: Natural and Unnatural. The former should be accepted as part of our nature because by being finite, human beings are subject to sufferings. The latter, however, should be seriously questioned because human beings do not deserve to suffer unnecessarily. As Victor Frankl writes in his book, Man’s Search For Meaning, “To suffer unnecessarily is masochistic rather than heroic.” Reflecting on the majority poor in our country, one may pause and ask: Do we, as the Zambian government, have the National Treasury?

SUFFERING, NATURAL OR NOT?

Analysing this question, Djokotoe and Chama observe in their book, Show Me The Money, that “However cruel it may sound like in talking about public money in the country with the majority poor, the truth is that public money exists, it is not an abstraction.” But there is an apparent failure by the government to translate public funds into tangible projects, such as improving services of health care, constructing roads, and improving the education system.

This is an indication of how the undisclosed amounts of public money slip through the cracks and disappear altogether from the government radar screen through selfish acts by leaders. Perhaps, the massive misappropriation of public money is the dividing force between the rich few and the majority poor.

The misappropriation of public money by government leaders is not a mere speculation! This year 2007 marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Mobutu Sese Seko, the dictator of the Democratic Republic of Congo who died in 1997. The British Journalist Michael Wrong described him as the “Inventor of modern kleptocracy”.

As Djokotoe and Chama write, “Mobutu had accumulated a personal bank account estimated at US$5 billion against his country’s annual income, which was below US$120 million and was therefore listed in the 2004 Transparency International studies as the third richest kleptocrate.”  With no sympathy for the majority poor, Mobutu even taught his party members, Mouvement Populaire de la Revolution (MPR) in 1984 the strategy of how to steal public money; “If you want to steal, do not steal too much at a time. You may be arrested. Steal cleverly, little by little.”

The case of Mobutu parallels the extravagance of Felix Houphonet-Boigny of Ivory Coast, who built a replica of St Peters’ Basilica of Rome in his home village of Yamassoukro in 1989 at a cost of US$260 million. When he was criticized for spending colossal sums of money on the project that was at odds with people’s needs, he said that the US$260 million was from his pocket and not from the National treasury. However, looking at the economy of Ivory Coast, one may ask: How did Felix get to be richer than the country he ruled?

EXTREME INDIVIDUALISM

With these examples, one may also question the moral justification of the Zambian government for spending a reported US$28million on a VIP helicopter for the head of state, when the majority poor are in desperate need of essential drugs, good schools, employment, and other needs.

As such, a sane analysis on our socio-political and economic systems reveals that a great deal of today’s suffering is a result of selfish leadership. The majority poor in our nation is not accidental! Our socio-political and economic systems have created an enormous disparity between the rich-few and the majority-poor. Perhaps, this chasm is a reminder that we have forgotten our traditional wisdom, which looks at social life as the basis of being human: “I am because we are.”

Evidently, our uncritical assimilation of the western values in the name of globalisation has disoriented us from this wisdom by merely regarding it as primitive. The result of this disorientation is the massive exhibitions of extreme individualism in leadership. Our leaders have become so individualistic that even state issues such as constitution making process, national budget, and other related issues are being personalised and therefore trivialised. For example, more often, we hear our President saying, “I… will give you… a new Constitution”. Why should he exclude us from deciding our very Constitution? This inhumane trend of the government leaders to keep the masses at the periphery of governance is part of the sordid legacy of colonialism that should be aborted from any government, here and now!

The prevailing situation of the majority-poor mired in a marginal situation of economic survival on one hand, and a handful of selfish leaders enjoying multiple homes and unlimited consumer capacity on the other, can also be explained in the loss of ubunthu in our leaders. Evidently, “atsogoleri athu sibanthu!” - Our leaders are not “human beings”! The apparent misappropriation of undisclosed sums of public money by government leadership makes the majority poor to question the humanity of these leaders because in our African wisdom, one’s humanity (ubunthu) is grounded in others (abanthu).

Let us consider the disappearance of K73 billion Basic Education Sub-Sector Investment Programme (BESSIP) funds in the year 2000. The fact that the money was diverted from being used for building new classrooms, upgrading old ones, and improving the supply of teaching and learning materials to private pockets shows how our leaders have seemingly sacrificed up their humanity by losing concern for the majority-poor in order to satisfy their self-interest.

The poor today have become objects of entertainment and means of making the rich, richer. As such, our leaders are watching the majority hungry citizens, the homeless multitudes, or indeed the people who lack what we may call “the necessities of life”, with smiles from the terraces of self-interests. We hardly realise that to think and act as a politician is to get on the road of becoming munthu by moving from self-interest to public service.

RICH FEW, BUT MAGORITY-POOR

Paradoxically, our leadership has become predatory in the sense that the majority-poor are being abused in broad daylight by the rich few through ways such as buying their votes for retention of power and continued accumulation of wealth. Politics should enable us to see the misery of our own brothers and sisters so as to fight all unnecessary suffering. Any leadership system whose heart and soul is not caught up in the sufferings of the majority is obsolete.

Our suffering, here and now, is not naturally determined. Rather, it is a result of callous leadership within our  government the rich uses government funds for personal medications in overseas’ hospitals, sending of their children to expensive schools, buying of luxury cars, and inviting investors for their personal benefits.

Therefore, if our socio-political and economic systems explicitly or implicitly exploit the weak, it is because our own brothers and sisters in leadership have sacrificed their humanity for money. A politician who goes around with a smiling face among the hungry, the homeless, the illiterate, the unjustly imprisoned, and the exploited workers has a questionable sanity!

Kamanga G. Lawrence
St. Dominic’s Major Seminary
Lusaka

If one of the brothers or one of the sisters is in need of clothes and has not enough food to live on, and one of you says to them, ‘I wish you well; keep yourself warm and eat plenty’, without giving them these bare necessities of life, then what good is that? Faith is like that: if good works do not go with it, it is quite dead. (James 2:15-17)