Childish Politics.

(From The Post (Zambia): AAGM)

THE warning and cautioning by police of Moomba UPND member of parliament Vitalis Mooya clearly demonstrates that there is hardly a more powerful weapon which can be abused in the hands of the government than that of initiating prosecutions.

And the judiciary, at whatever level, may find itself confronting these abuses, and may find itself subjected to enormous pressures to accept them. Often, if the process is legal but unfair, there is little that a court can do. How can one explain the police's warning and cautioning of Mooya following a directive from President Levy Mwanawasa for them to do so?

How can the police claim to be acting professionally and independently when they are executing political orders without any serious investigations of the matter?

The sensitivity that President Mwanawasa is showing to criticism, actual or perceived, will not and cannot further the ends of democracy. How can President Mwanawasa take the question of hunger and people dying of it to be a personal criticism for which he must order the police to arrest a man who was elected to raise exactly the alarm that he was raising.

A member of parliament, by definition, must bring to public knowledge issues that are affecting his constituency. Wrong or right, that is his job. A member of parliament is a spokesman for the voiceless in the area that he represents - palatable or unpalatable. He goes to Parliament to advance the interests of his local community in the sharing of the national cake or the crumbs left by the shameless thieves that ran our country for the last 10 years.

A good member of parliament must do all in his power to ensure that the interests of his local community are not lost in the fray of dealing with wider national issues. Honourable Mooya does no wrong when he tells the nation that people are dying of hunger in his constituency. Is this an issue that we should start debating? Is President Mwanawasa being reasonable on this issue? Has he no relatives who live in the compounds and some rural areas who even without the drought were starving anyway due to the poor agriculture policies that MMD chose to pursue - policies ...