Maravi

Thank you to KK and his comrades
By Editor
Sat 25 May 2013, 14:00 CAT

It is important to have a sense of gratitude. We should be grateful for all that has been given to us and for all that has been done for us.

Of course, our first and greatest thanks should go to the Creator of all things - God. But God works through people. This means that our second thanks should go to all those people God has chosen to be of service to us, those people who have accepted to be God's servants and serve us.

We should be grateful to the Creator for creating a man like Dr Kenneth Kaunda and placing him at his service in our homeland.

And there is need for us to follow the teachings of Michael Sata on this score. Michael has shown us how to be grateful, thankful to Dr Kaunda and his comrades for what they have done for us and for giving us a country, a respected homeland. And this teaching seems to have been well accepted given the response that Michael's words on thanking Dr Kaunda and his comrades received in that church, in that Cathedral of the Holy Cross. It is a demonstration of our people's sense of gratitude and their faith in those who have faith in them. The Zambian people seem to know how to honour and respect those who are loyal to them, those who sacrifice for them.

This sense of loyalty that Michael is demonstrating needs to be encouraged and inculcated in all our people, especially the young ones. They all need to be taught to respect the people who gave up everything to serve them. They need to be made aware that these people fought a noble battle and lived their lives in pursuit of a better life for all of us, for all who follow. The Zambia we are enjoying today was made possible by them and is the sweet fruit of their lives of struggle and sacrifice.
And our people also need to be made aware how selfless Dr Kaunda and his comrades were. These are very humble and honest human beings who, despite being in power for many years, own nothing. They could have shared all the land among themselves like their colleagues did in Kenya. Dr Kaunda is not a landowner and neither are Grey Zulu and others. Compare this with what their friends owned in Kenya. In Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta was the biggest landowner and his family is today very rich because of this. This cannot be said of any of our liberators. Most of them today live in poverty and don't seem to count for anything. Michael is trying to reverse this.

Our country is too poor to give them great material wealth, but we can give them a sense of human dignity - a feeling of counting for something; a feeling of being near and necessary to their people.
This generation now reaching the end of a long and heroic struggle deserves special treatment.

A society that does not value its liberators, those who founded it and gave it everything they had, denies its roots and endangers its future.
Let's march to a new future based on a sound basis of respect for those who gave us their lives, who sacrificed everything to give us the Zambia we have today.

There are some people who, by pursuing their own convictions and without being self-conscious about it touch the lives of millions of others. Such have been the lives of Dr Kaunda and his comrades.
We are extremely fortunate as a nation to have had such an outstanding revolutionary as Dr Kaunda leading our independence struggle.

We share the pride of Michael in having Dr Kaunda, comrade Zulu and other leading liberators of our country with us. We should all thank the Lord for giving them a relatively long life. Their sacrifices are worthy of the greatest honour. We hope one day we will erect statues all over our homeland in their honour. We thank them for giving quality, integrity, principles and values to political life in our country. For all that, we are truly grateful. We thank them for the example they have shown us and we should assure them of our love and respect. What more could a person expect out of one life?

In praising these outstanding comrades, we are not in any way trying to turn them into saints. They are not saints. They are simple human beings who committed everything they had to the common good of our people and our homeland. They made many mistakes. They had many failures and weaknesses. But one thing they had in abundance was loyalty to their people and their country. These were honest men and women who made mistakes. They were not crooks like the political crooks we see today in Zambia. They were not thieves out to enrich themselves using their prestige and the high offices they occupied like some of the politicians we have today. This sets them far apart from the other leaders we have had. And it gives us great hope that Michael sees this in these old comrades and is trying to live up to their standards and values. And if Michael continues on this path, we have no doubt that he will accomplish much more and he will make all the people of Zambia what destiny intended them to be. With this attitude of Michael, we will end a period of ill fortune, and Zambia will discover herself again. The greatest ambition of Dr Kaunda and his comrades has been to wipe out poverty and ignorance, disease and inequality; to wipe away every tear from every eye. There is still poverty, ignorance, disease and inequality in our midst. And as long as there are tears and suffering, their work is not over, and Michael and all of us have a duty to continue it. And so we have to labour and to work, and work hard, to give reality to these dreams.

posted by MrK @ 8:07 PM