Over the years as I’ve grown a bit older as a writer, I’ve realised that one will have very little or no impact on our political leaders if one takes an extremely antagonistic approach. There is no way you can make a leader listen to you if you call them demeaning and insulting names. Of course if they are beyond redemption, you can write in such a style because you are just expressing your anger and hoping that others learn from your words; but if your intention is to actually affect such leaders (because you do not believe they are yet beyond hope), then the words you use in addressing them can make all the difference.

Laura Miti-Banda, a long-serving guest columnist of the Post newspaper, has apparently missed this lesson. Her articles have become more and more rancorous with time, and if she imagines that someone will actually read her articles and change “for the better”, she is taking her own imagination too seriously.

Take for instance her recent August 25th article in which she decided to attack president Mwanawasa for his recent statements concerning child bearing and poverty. The president had said that if people can’t afford to take care of their children (educationally), they should not have children. “Next they will be asking government to clothe their children,” the president lamented, as he responded to some people who were complaining that certain schools still ask them to pay for a few things (through the Parents Teachers Association) instead of giving them completely and absolutely free education in accordance with government policy!

Laura Miti-Banda was so incensed by this statement from the president that she wrote an incredible diatribe in which she let her anger run free through her words. And yet like other Post writers on economic issues, she failed to see the contradictions in her own article.

Ms Miti-Banda opens her article with an obvious logical fallacy – a straw man argument: “And so president Levy Mwanawasa figures that poor Zambians who cannot afford to educate the children they bring into the world should keep their zips up. He cannot understand why the majority poor people in the country do not know better than to involve themselves in activities whose by-product is children. Leave sex to us the rich damn you …”

The first thing about the straw man fallacy is that it involves lying about what your opponent actually said (or clearly meant) so that you can attack them more easily (with little intellectual effort). The fallacy in her opening statement therefore is to suggest that prevention of child-bearing requires abstinence from sex, and thus to tell the people “he is telling you not to have sex because you do not have money” - so that they can become angry at the issuer of that statement (the president), and so that she could make her argument against him much easier. This is how fallacies work and it is dishonest to argue like that. One should always represent one’s opponent accurately and then just tackle what they said exactly as they said it.

But perhaps we can forgive this mistake from Ms Miti-Banda and assume that it is a product of genuine ignorance on her part. Coming from a strong Catholic background (she worked or works for the Catholic council), Ms Banda has probably taken the Catholic forbiddance of contraception so seriously that she has forgotten how the real world (including most Catholics) actually lives. She has forgotten that it is actually possible for people to avoid having children while not “keeping their zips up”.  Contraception is one of the most innovative inventions of modern science and it enables couples to prevent pregnancies without exercising the self-immolating penance of abstinence. The president never said anything against sex, he only advised against child-bearing for those who know they can’t afford to look after children.

Fully convinced that she has presented a devastatingly logical argument, Ms Miti-Banda proceeds to lay her first explicit insult on the president for his statement: “We have become quite accustomed to the man’s by turns arrogant, bizarre, or downright dumb public statements. With this one however, one has to ask, what on earth was the man thinking? (Or was he not, as usual?)”

Ms Banda states quite explicitly that President Mwanawasa does not normally engage in the activity of thinking (“was he not [thinking], as usual?” she asks). So, how exactly does she expect him to understand her articles without thinking? Given the failure at achieving any logical coherence in her own articles, it is understandable that she expects people who don’t think to understand her. Hers is the kind of insult that achieves nothing from a writer, except to antagonise the intended target even further, unless of course one’s intention is simply to impress some shallow readers who are wont to praise one as “very courageous and fearless,” regardless of intellectual content.

Ms Banda did not end her insults there. She obviously felt this was not offensive enough, so she crowned her article with an even bigger insult: “what kind of buffoon does this country have in state house that he does not know that every child is 100 percent potential?” I personally do not support the law that forbids people from insulting the president because I completely believe in free speech, but this kind of writing achieves absolutely nothing because it leads people to discussing your insult instead of discussing any of the contents of your article. But I’ll leave it there.

Now, what do I think about the President’s statement? I think it was great, quite honestly, but that’s because I’m a hopeless believer in the powerful principle of capitalism and individualism. If we could follow in the footsteps of the richest countries, follow the way they started out – with radical capitalism – we would be as rich as they are. It doesn’t get simpler than that.

To me the President’s statement is just common sense: if you are so poor that you can’t even take care of yourself, why in the hell would you want to bring ten more children into this world? What’s wrong with just using common sense and realising that it is better to first find a good job before you start heaping many responsibilities on yourself? I seriously can not understand what was so offensive about that statement.

Socialists like Ms Banda have twisted the whole issue and made it a matter of human rights. This again is the fallacy of the straw man (her articles provide quite a rich collection of fallacies that you can use to learn how not to present an argument!) Mister Mwanawasa did not say he shall introduce a “one-child policy” law or things like that; he simply advised people to think before going in hot pursuit of the biblical injunction to populate every corner of the earth. We are not rabbits, we are rational beings, and it is only rational that we plan our lives according to our resources. The problem is that we want to relegate the role of planning to the state instead of doing it ourselves, because Kenneth Kaunda taught us that government was the central planner of our lives. But to consume more than you produce is the most irrational plan you can have for your own life.

I know, people will say it is wrong for the statement to come from the republican president. Their reason, of course, is that they believe it is the government’s duty to take care of all their children, so this is why the president should not say such things. Firstly, it’s not true that it is government’s duty to educate everyone – child or not, just as it is not true that it is government’s duty to feed everyone, or to clothe everyone, or to transport everyone when they need transport, or yes – to give jobs to everyone. This is the thing Kaunda believed in and he destroyed a promising economy because of such insane centrally-planned consumerist policies. It is completely appalling that educated people in Zambia have never learnt that single most important economic lesson of Kaunda’s era and they still continue espousing that nonsense and crying that government should continue with them. They even want to include them  in the Bill of Rights so that government will have no choice but to faithfully implement such self-destructive policies.

How one wishes that we could realise the very simple lesson that all rich, capitalist countries learnt long ago: people must take responsibility for their own lives, and for the children they bring into this world, instead of looking up to government for everything. This is particularly critical for a young, struggling economy. The rich countries can afford to do some of these wrong and wasteful socialist things simply because they have made a lot of money, but in the beginning they were almost completely capitalist: they emphasised the virtue of self-responsibility; they had no huge welfare programs, high taxes, and so on.

Now, some might argue that some people are too poor and they need government assistance as a result. But how can they fail to see that that poverty is not caused by anything mysterious or mystical: it is caused by the same government assistance, because they have to tax producers to hell in order to meet those needs. And when they punish the productive sector, the poor people can not find jobs because producers have to cut their costs, and because other investors avoid this environment in fear of these costs (we actually had big manufacturers that left the country because of that simple reason and yet we still don’t believe it!)

Secondly, the high taxes also directly affect the poor people (as Michael Sata correctly observed), especially since businesses add the tax to the prices of their products. The poor people therefore spend more money than they should to buy simple commodities, and they get totally broke as a result: thus needing more government help, and government taxes everyone more, and the cycle continues.

What is totally irritating is that the same educated people who say government should help the poor as much as possible are the same ones who also complain that government taxes are too high! They expect government to spend more on “free services” and to also lower taxes (and Michael Sata took advantage of this ignorance by promising to do both!) It has never happened in the history of humanity and it will never happen.

The high expenditures we want the government to make can only come from the high taxes. There is no magical source for their money. There is no such thing as a free lunch, as the great capitalist economist, Milton Friedman, famously said. If you want “more money in your pockets”, you must make less demands on your government so that they do not take more money from your pockets, and so that there will be more employers in the country to put more money in more pockets. That’s the only way to national prosperity and no other way can work.

This is such basic economics that I believe it should be taught in primary schools (okay, maybe secondary schools), and yet the mystery of mysteries is that it completely evades the minds of most people in our beloved country, including the most educated. If this is what “free education” has produced, then it is just one more reason why government should abandon it.

President Mwanawasa’s infamous statement thus signalled a small ray of hope that we could have leaders one day who can tell the people the real truth, the basic common sense that African leaders have always avoided like a plague because of the popularity it could cost them. Someone has to tell the people that they should take responsibility for their own lives if they really want the economy to change. Economies do not change through empty promises of manna for everyone; they change through people actually taking the burden of personal responsibility on their own shoulders instead of looking up to others for this; this is the culture promoted in all developed nations as much as possible and it is the only thing that is responsible for their great development, as China has also recently discovered.

African politicians never say such things because they want people to look up to them as messiahs (with their “free lunch” promises), so that they can continue being popular. Mwanawasa is quite possibly the first African president to have said this kind of thing although I doubt he will say it again, having seen the great forces of irrationality and insulting ignorance that responded in unison against him.