ARE UPND’s FACEBOOK-BASED MILLENNIALS MEANT TO BOLSTER HH’s POLITICAL FORTUNES?

For policymaking UPND politicians, it’s easy to discount the millennial generation as lazy, footloose and obsessed with social media. In Zambia, the whole generation is derided as Yo-Bali, those who prefer to lounge at home with their aged parents, rather than embrace a more financially independent lifestyle. But such easy stereotypes belie a much harsher economic reality. And nowhere is this despondent realism more evident than in upper-class city suburbs seemingly on the verge of perpetual economic and societal change.

Zambian millennials – those born after 1999 – many have confronted the 2008 global financial crisis as kindergarten- going kids and the ongoing Covid-19 crisis as grownups.

But even these crises are mere bookmarks in the longer story of Zambian economic fragmentation which began with the World Bank-induced Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and the subsequent privatization of national assets of the early 1990s.

This is a stagnation which has already resulted in a whole generation of young Zambians being without steady employment, bereft of economic independence and increasingly without hope for the future.

Although Zambian millennials are more educated and skilled than their parents, two out of three workers with a short-term contract are under thirty.

As a result, young Zambian adults are seemingly poorer than the previous generation. Closing this dichotomy – between the struggling younger generations and their often seemingly affluent parents and grandparents – is the biggest obstacle to fundamentally rebooting Zambia’s economy.

Perhaps even more importantly, giving young Zambians a fair opportunity at economic independence requires challenging the stranglehold on political policymaking held by older Zambians.

But to give millennials a fighting chance at success means confronting two bedrocks of Zambian society: an antiquated education system and a reorientation of political power away from well-heeled middle-aged and retired Zambians.

The Zambian education system is exacerbating millennial struggles. Highly theoretical and based on the acquisition of general background knowledge but few life-sustaining practical skills, the Zambian teaching system at the post-primary level is not attuned to the realities of the 21st- century labour market. The results are either abstract or controversially obscure.

This millennial disenfranchisement has caused frustration, distrust of government and a tendency to vote for pseudo- populist parties.

Zambia is a society where young people are showing signs of being interested in politics once more – their patience is running out with high levels of unemployment.

This does not necessarily mean that they will be rushing to join political parties however – despite the choices on offer.

Known and unknown to many, the United Nations World Youth Report, released in 2007, suggested that young people around the globe were participating politically, but not in a conventional way.

For example, it said the youth would rather volunteer at local clinics and schools to uplift their communities than directly campaign for a political party. This has not stopped parties looking for new avenues of expression.

For instance, there is evidence that Zambian politicians seem to have learnt from the American experience. Take the social networking site, Facebook, for example. President Barack Obama used it effectively to lure the youth into voting for him.

This is precisely what we are seeing mimicked by the UPND mobilization team on Facebook, buoyed by funds from UK- based SABI Strategy Group and South African-based Brenthurst Foundation to brand the 2021 UPND presidential candidate Hakainde Hichilema as “Bally-1”.

Prominent among his backers has been Henry Sands the managing director at SABI, a firm that provides comprehensive communication strategies and solutions to international businesses, high-net-worth individuals and political organizations. Sands attended Birmingham University, where the UPND leader also attended to study for his finance and business strategy masters programme.

Many politicians including Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu are now on Facebook.

They interact with their supporters through this medium. UPND for one boasts that this has helped inject life into politics by appealing to young people.

Some analysts agree. But for young people domiciled in city slums and rural settings, without access to luxuries such as smartphones and the internet, bread- and-butter issues remain the focus.

Despite dabbling in technology and trying to appear hip, political parties must still attend to young people’s urgent needs.

Top of the to-do list are ideas and initiatives of creating jobs, reducing levels of political violence and combating an HIV/Aids epidemic that is reportedly claiming hundreds of lives every day in Zambia – many of them young.

The first thing is to realise that neither a naive UPND leadership nor its much- heralded “Bally will fix it!” campaign message will save Zambia.

Such initiatives will only facilitate the existing opposition party’s policymakers clinging to top positions while the money flows from the foreign-based paymasters. Millions of dollars of investment in the regime-change agenda and online propaganda activities against the PF will change nothing, if more deep-seated structural intraparty reforms are ignored. Secondly, Facebook-based millennials should refuse to accept the current status quo as the only available path for the UPND.

This will mean confronting the older generations about the illogicality of such generational inequality. It means the young need to inject a sense of urgency and positive disruption into their approach to mainstream intraparty politics. It’s time for a productive movement of change that is not just the same old negative messaging stuck on repeat.

For all the noise they generate, groupings like GEARS/CiSCA/OCiDA are devoid of tangible intraparty reform proposals. So what can UPND’s Facebook-based millennials do?

How can they bolster HH’s political fortunes, yet existing UPND politicians are incapable of internally reforming the party because that would mean compromising their own tightly held privileges?

Without age-conscious politics, UPND intraparty democracy will remain a façade behind which the rich, the corrupt and the deceitful keep exploiting the youth. Millennial netizens need to re-imagine equality at this time of reckoning before the 2021 polls. Critically, they need to re-imagine Facebook-based movements moved into action by the belief that one life is no less important than another, and no one life should be lived at the expense of another.