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Edgar Chagwa Lungu’s reign of terror in Zambia has been characterized by persistent persecution of political opposition and the media and the threat of elimination looming for anyone who dissents. As president, he has led by extremely authoritarian and undemocratic methods including the abuse of the police and a monopoly on violence. 

On the world stage, this corrupt kleptocrat is not alone. Madman, ultra-rightwing, racist and fascist president Donald Trump of the United States; neo-fascist and theocratic prime minister Narendra Modi of India; villlainous and fascist president Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil; underhanded, coup-plotter prime minister Emerson Mnangagwa of Zimbabwe; and right-wing, looter and butcher of Marikana president Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa are today among some of the most pronounced evidence of the rotten and decayed world neoliberal capitalist system that continues to keep billions of human beings in excruciating poverty, hunger, unemployment and crippling extreme inequalities. 

The coronavirus pandemic has shone a most brilliant light on the complete inability of the world capitalist system to protect all human life, life on the planet! 

It is not by accident that the United States, the so-called “leader of the free world” and supposedly richest country on Earth, has the highest rates of infections and deaths! A social system based on private greed and profits cannot protect human beings when pandemics hit them! Trump is more interested in winning a second term of office to continue to loot the US treasury and economy with his greedy capitalist friends, than in safeguarding the health and wellbeing of the people of the US. 

Similarly, Mnangagwa in Zimbabwe is willing to kill his own people in order to continue to hold on to power he illegally acquired, and to loot Zimbabwe. Ramaphosa in South Africa is punishing the working class with extremely harsh austerity measures during a pandemic. He has refused to give minibus operators the subsidies they need to provide safe transport to the working class who make and sustain his billions, instead advising that they should keep their windows open to allow the virus to fly out! Between the private banks and his people, Ramaphosa chooses the former.  

Edgar Chagwa Lungu on the other hand, like all tinpot dictators whose governments are swimming in oceans of corruption scandals while their people wallow in extreme poverty, is already campaigning for an unconstitutional third term while doing everything possible to prevent his opposition from functioning, let alone campaign.

Last week, Socialist Party General Secretary Dr Cosmas Musumali and 29 Party members were arrested during a meeting with Party workers in the Copperbelt Province, Zambia. They were charged with a baseless “conduct likely to cause the breach of peace” and were released in the afternoon of the same day. We condemn the fake charge that our comrades have been slapped with as authoritarian nonsense! We are sorely reminded of the colonial regimes where people were systematically arrested on ridiculous charges such as this one. 

Neocolonial disasters like Lungu, Ramaphosa, Modi, Bolsonaro and their notorious style of misrule must be condemned in no unequivocal terms with the strongest contempt their inhumane practices deserve. 

The international Socialist Working-Class community has noticed that from the inception of the Socialist Party, intimidation has run rampant. We recall two years ago, at the inauguration of the Party, two of our comrades from the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) were harassed by immigration officials at Kenneth Kaunda International Airport. They were not alone: comrades invited from the Socialist Forum of Ghana, a news team from Pan African Television and many others from progressive organizations who simply wanted to witness the birth of the Socialist Party were arrested and deported without explanation. 

Zambia Police and Zambian immigration officials, clearly under instructions from Lungu’s Patriotic Front party, ignored not only Zambian laws and Constitution, but international conventions which guarantee safe entry and exit out of countries for all persons in possession of valid international travel documents. The Zambian officials prevented them from proceeding and some comrades were detained for several hours and their phones and passports were unjustifiably confiscated before being sent back home. They were treated like criminals simply for attempting to attend the launch of the Socialist Party in Zambia. 

As the elections approach, the PF continues to grab at straws to remain in power. Zambia’s current constitution does not allow presidents to rule for more than two terms. Edgar Chagwa Lungu is not Constitutionally qualified to contest the 2021 Elections for president. We are aware however, that Lungu will do everything to ensure his name will not only be on the ballot, but that he will also claim to have won the elections. 

To make all this election fraud possible, while he himself is travelling all over the country campaigning at the expense of Zambian tax payers, under the pretext of “national presidential duty” and the threat of the pandemic, opposition parties cannot even hold internal party meetings without being harassed, arrested and charged by the police! 

Lungu and his cronies all over the world are lackeys of the decayed and dying capitalism and imperialism world systems who criminally act with impunity! But, as the Socialist Party has already said, we know that “impunity is a hyena that has no ally or friend”. Subverting Zambia’s multiparty democracy and political pluralism by arresting our comrades demonstrates just how rotten and fictitious is so-called liberal multiparty “democracy”. 

Like all authoritarian, fascist and corrupt regimes, Lungu is hopelessly scared of the possibility of the Zambian urban and rural workers knowing the true extent of the economic and social disaster that his government has unleashed on Zambians. Having no socio-economic response to the heart-tearing misery Zambians have been exposed to and now very well magnified by the pandemic, Lungu mercilessly dismissed, summarily, his central bank governor when this man naively ventured to warn Zambians about the dire situation they are confronted with, thanks mainly due to Lungu.  

We know that Lungu and all his type see the existence of a genuine socialist alternative in Zambia as a threat to the rampant corruption which has defined his PF government. Lungu’s dependence on repressive antics clearly shows that his Party and regime have nothing to offer the Zambian people, and they instead resort to abuse of the police to suppress political activity of those committed to genuine change. The arbitrary arrests of SP comrades is a direct trampling on their individual rights which are enshrined in Article 11(b) of the Zambian Constitution which states that individuals have, among other rights, the right to “freedom of conscience, expression, assembly, movement and association.”

We are, however, proud to note that in contrast to this, the Socialist Party’s recently released manifesto has been fast gaining traction on the ground. The Socialist Party is committed to building a Zambia based on the principles of justice, equity and peace. Dedicated to a revolutionary cause for a socialist Zambia, the programme of the SP has declared non-violent war on the miserable conditions of extreme poverty and backwardness defining the Zambian people under the regime of Edgar Lungu. 

At the centre of SP’s anti-poverty and job-creation strategy are three pillars of its social and political programme, namely; education, health and peasant agriculture. On the education front, the SP has already begun practical commitments to their programme through the Fred M’membe Literacy Campaign. Levels of illiteracy in Zambia are said to be around 55% with women often being on the receiving end of this terrible reality. The Fred M’membe Literacy Campaign aims to overhaul this by extending the reach of literacy classes to more women. SP has also adopted a policy of 50 percent women participation across all structures while encouraging a vibrant youth leadership. 

The brutal regimes such as the one of Edgar Lungu must immediately desist from further descending into its warlord tendencies characterised by arbitrary arrests, and other forms of intimidation suffered by our SP comrades. 

We call upon the world progressive and genuine democracy loving working class organisations to speak out against these oppressive practices by the PF government. 

We stand firm in solidarity with our comrades in SP as they continue to dedicate their energies in arresting the neocolonial arrangement in Zambia which serves the interests of capitalist and imperialist forces and a tiny thieving local elite while impoverishing millions of Zambians.

Amaka! Kubantu!

Issued by Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party