blasé 🇿🇲

The fact that the UPND has found time to conduct a comparative study on dictatorship to sit down, measure, weigh, and officially conclude that "we are less dictatorial than PF" should tell us everything we need to know. In law, an innocent man does not walk around holding a press conference to announce that he is less guilty than the previous accused. Innocence does not require a comparative analysis. It speaks for itself. If you are truly democratic, you do not need to benchmark your democracy against PF. You do not need to say, "Yes, we arrest, we teargas, we block protests, we intimidate journalists but PF did it worse." That is not a defence. That is a confession with a footnote. It is the legal equivalent of a thief telling the court: "My Lord, I stole, but the previous thief stole more." The court does not acquit you for being a second-place thief. And as for telling President Khama to mind his own business,sovereignty is not a shield to hide behind when you are being criticised. Sovereignty means the people of Zambia have the right to be heard. It does not mean the government has the right to silence them and then call it sovereignty. If UPND has to constantly remind us that they are not PF, perhaps it is because their actions are starting to look so much like PF that even they are getting confused. They Promised low tax we are seeing the opposite. A government that is confident in its democratic credentials does not compare itself to a dictatorship. It simply governs democratically. The very need for comparison is the admission.