POLITICIANS NOT KEEPING THEIR PROMISES

...who is to blame?

APLATITUDE holds that politicians cannot be trusted to keep their promises and it is true because experiences with politicians and their failure to keep promises backs this belief.

Less than a quadrimester after the August 12 elections, politicians are already breaking the promises that made them win the elections and the very important question now is - who really is to blame for their failure to keep promises?

The genuine and guileless answer is - we the voters are to blame. We tolerate dishonesty. Yes, we can blame politicians for lying, but as a wise and old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

We the voters are largely to blame for always letting politicians get away with “lying” because we consider it less serious compared to corruption or abuse of office.

If we really wanted politicians to keep all their promises, any observed broken promise would provoke a shrill and hysterical public outcry: “I will never vote for you again!” alas this is never the case.

Politicians break their promises because voters don’t really punish them for doing so. Voters love politicians so much that they even go to war to defend them for breaking their promises.

As a result, politicians know that even if they don’t deliver their promises they have an army of defenders behind their backs who voted for them in the election.

Prior to the August 12 elections, we were bombarded with an avalanche of promises. We were promised as voters that the dollar will appreciate within hours after the President is sworn in, we were promised that fuel prices will be reduced and middlemen will be cut off because they are the reason why prices are high.

We were also promised that electricity tariffs will be reduced because the current tariffs are negatively affecting businesses and most entrepreneurs are finding it difficult to meet the costs. Simply put, the campaigns were a fusillade of sweet promises.

Elections are behind us but we are just getting started because we are on the next level of our civic duty. Politicians are already hardly fulfilling their sweet promises because they are learning it the hard way while in office that things are not what they thought they were.

This is not peculiar to Zambia, it happens everywhere. For instance, former United States President Donald Trump when running for office promised to build the infamous wall but failed to deliver when he got into office.

Ridiculous his promise may have been he promised it and some Americans voted for him based on the same promise and he ought to have been held accountable.

It has become a norm that lying your way into office is the definition of “politics” and what makes it even more painful is that we the voters tend to exonerate politicians who lie.

Instead of doing our civic duty of holding our favourite politicians accountable, we choose to tolerate being lied to because we think “politics is a dirty game” and lying is part and parcel of it.

I find the notion that politics is a dirty game one of the reasons why politicians take advantage of voters and lie. For starters, politics is not a game but serious social science of leadership. Speaking of leadership, one very important quality of it is integrity and integrity refers to being honest, trustworthy and reliable.

Acting according to one’s words is the epitome of leadership of integrity and for us to develop as a country, we need leaders of integrity.

Our allegiance must always be to the country and we all owe mother Zambia our civic duty of sanitising our politics and putting an end to the lies synonymous with it by holding our political leaders accountable at all times. It should not only be when we feel disenfranchised and excluded from the political system.

For long we have been showered with lies during campaigns by politicians and when they get into office we the same victims tend to defend them for lying to us. The shame is not on the politicians for lying to us but we the voters for being gullible.

Politicians were put in power by our vote. Therefore it is now our civic duty to stay active in the political process after elections by checking in and keeping tabs.

Together we can all hold our elected officials accountable and move the country forward.