As usual, a lot of articles will be written in different Zambian newspapers during the independence week, and a lot of speeches will be made on the day itself, and the theme, predictably, will be the same old one: we have had political independence for so many years, now we need economic independence. The speeches and the articles will regurgitate this statement ad nauseam, and they will also invariably add that "we need to find solutions to our economic problems that will lead us to economic independence." What will be uniformly missing in these articles and speeches, of course, are the solutions themselves!

Well, there will be a few who will decide to be different and actually offer "solutions". And the solution will be, "government needs to find solutions"!

In the movie "The Usual Suspects", someone makes the statement "the greatest trick the devil played was to convince the world that he does not exist." The climactic twist in the movie [spoiler alert] is that the person who was helping the police to find the "devil" was actually the devil himself!

Economic independence. For us to achieve it, the first question we need to ask is, "independence from who (or what)"? When we achieved colonial independence, it was easier because we knew who we needed to fight: it was the colonial master, Great Britain. But now we have a problem: who are we supposed to fight against to gain economic independence? Who are we supposed to become independent from?

To find out who we need to be independent from, we have to find who we are dependent on. To become independent simply means to STOP depending on someone (or something) else; it means to start depending on yourself.

So, who are we dependent on? Our intellectuals and academicians provide all kinds of interesting answers to this question: some suggest it is the same colonialists who have come back in a more lethal form, with their allies this time! And they even have a new name for them: the 'neocolonialists'. Our intellectuals are thus passionate in their efforts to make the government fight these "evil" Western neocolonialists. It is said that they are trying to recolonise us through the debt, by using their agents of neocolonialist imperialism: the IMF and the World Bank. To our intellectuals, therefore, economic independence will come when we defeat these forces of neocolonialism (never mind that even after some of these poor nations' debts have been canceled, no real improvement has been seen, but the theory of a neocolonialist conspiracy still continues anyway!)

But wait. What if we have identified the wrong 'devil'? What if the one we least suspect is the one who is really the one we need to become independent from? What if the usual suspects are actually innocent?

In fact, this is the very case. The government, the one we are depending on to help us gain economic independence, is really the one who has enslaved us! What we need is to become economically independent from our own government. What we need is to stop depending on government, in other words, and to become dependent on ourselves, as individuals, as people. This is the only key and there is no other.

Economic independence is much more difficult than political independence because in this case (economic independence), our government leaders are the ones who are supposed to free us from the very institution they lead!

What makes it even more difficult is that they can lose their jobs if they try to help us gain independence from themselves! This is truly a complex situation. Leaders who do the right thing risk becoming unpopular, especially with those who have become addicted to this dependency syndrome, either directly or simply intellectually. It is a choice that has to be made by a leader, but it is one that is very difficult to make (populism is so much easier!). It can only be made by one who is truly enlightened to the truth of this principle, and believes in being principled.

The other thing that makes this independence complex is that the colonizer this time (the government) has actually got a good and kind motive for its colonialism of the people. They thought that they were actually helping the people when they made them dependent on them. They thought they were helping the people when they promised to give them free education, free healthcare, minimum wage laws, child labour laws, price controls, nationalization, and a myriad of other "kind" laws. They did not know that they were simply following a blueprint for condemning their people to perpetual poverty.

They even created many licenses required for a business to operate, and created many ministries to monitor and regulate these license conditions and all other aspects of economic activity, thinking they were really helping the people. These very things have become the major impediments to the survival of those very people. Not only has the maintenance of such a system become so costly that they have to punish those same people with incredibly high taxes to just keep it in existence, but the bureaucratic processes themselves are a huge tax for a business (local or foreign) that wishes to operate in the country. The real losers are the people themselves, who cannot find jobs because there are so few businesses as a result of these impeding policies. And yet the motive was good.

So, how does one identify something that's trying to help the people as being the biggest enemy of the people? How, indeed, does one who is even a part of that thing, a leader, accept it as the cause of the people's suffering? It is a big thing to ask of a human mind.

And yet it is the only hope we have. It requires a revolutionary shattering of a paradigm that now controls the thinking of our intellectuals and politicians. It requires us to start ignoring the "usual suspects" (IMF and World Bank and Western countries), realizing that these are neither the real cause of our problems nor the solution to them. They are just a distraction from the real culprit that has held us in chains for so long: our own wrong system of saving our lives.

Our salvation will come only when enough people among us wake up to see the light, and to thus crush the entire system that was designed to help us survive, but which has since become the biggest single liability in any prospects of our survival. We must eradicate socialism and the lethally high taxes it has created to sustain itself. We must demand the removal of government from control of our economic lives, in the same way and for the same reasons that we demand their removal from control of our religious lives (or lack of it), and in the same way and for the same reasons that we demand their removal from control of our intellectual lives. In short, they should not control the economy just as they should not control the church, just as they should not control the media. How long shall it take for us to realize that freedom – true and total freedom – is the only key to unlocking the power of the human mind, in any area whatsoever, economic or any other?

Happy independence day.

(If you have been helped by this or any other article on this subject, please send me an email through admin@zambia.co.zm to encourage me :)
I will reply – C.C.)