TWO THINGS

During election time many Zambian celebrities and radio and TV personalities took to the media telling us what they wanted to see in a leader they believed in. Some raised some pretty powerful points but I don’t want to mention names because I am about to finish my degree and I would really like to live ‘til then. I don’t like to make political statements because I love my life. That simple. But I am a voter, and my blog has readers of a voting age and many many young voters. I know I have been slacking for months on the blogsphere and I have fallen way out of your graces but I’d like to think I have an onion that matters (I’m sorry I had to use the onion joke) and that I’d like to interact with your minds still.

I think people should vote for a person that does two things only. A leader that gives the people hope. A leader that has a realistic plan to eradicate poverty. I am not hard to please, that’s all I need.

Obama made even white people vote for him because he gave people hope, him and his charismatic aura, his perfect shade of black and his speeches that make my ovaries twitch with babies that want to be a part of his world. A world where there is equality for opportunity, a world where people have control over their destiny, a world where people have peace and power at the same time. He makes you say ‘Yes we can’ even if you have no idea how you will. I am not asking for Obama to be our president, but a president who gives his people hope is crucial. Where there is hope there is a manifestation of life. A man who hopes is a man who works, who believes, who creates change and believes steadfastly that things can get better. That man has been missing in Zambia. The man I see almost every day commuting from point A to point B is a tired man, a man that just wants to make it to the next day, a man who doesn’t know who he is and where he is going or what is next. That man needs hope.

Poverty is a never ending cycle. Theorists fail to define it and have ended up just calling it ‘a state of lack’. If the Prince of Wales can’t find his house slippers and is lacking them is he then living in poverty? Somebody asked that so theorists went a step further to give a lower limit for the definition and so the saying came that if you are living on a dollar a day or less you are poor or living in poverty.

I am a social worker and psychologist by day, blogger by night and social butterfly on the weekends. I see people in abject poverty everyday sometimes, then sometimes I see people who are so rich my mind cannot comprehend and then I see myself. I live on more than a dollar a day so I don’t make the cut for poverty but there are things I worry about that my friends with private jets don’t. But I was blessed enough to have parents that dreamt, a mother with the patience of Buddha and a father with the hustle of a prostitute before sunrise. So I have been blessed with opportunity, with intelligence, with the knowledge to know where my abilities can take me and where hard work will take me. Poverty does not know such things.

I have come to define poverty as a never ending cycle because usually where it exists, the mind and the opportunity to break the cycle does not exist. I am about to be blunt. Poor women have no empowering information and have low self-esteem, they bond with poor men who then father their children. Poor fathers cannot afford expensive schools or expensive recreational activities, do not have well connected friends and have no education so they exchange rotten ideas and beliefs with their low life friends and they get drunk on cheap alcohol, spend the little they earn and offer no role model for their children. Poor parents send poor children to schools that are cheap but offer low quality education. Poor children cannot concentrate in class because dad came home drunk and did something deplorable and mom couldn’t defend. Poor children cannot perform well in class because they are hungry and believe it or not the brain consumes calories when you think, with few calories to spare the children don’t think, they fail and chose to drop out and they grow up either way and become the poor men and the poor women that marry each other and propagate the cycle.

Poverty is in the mind and then it manifests in the surrounding. Poverty will never end according to some theorists because it creates the balance of life. But at least I believe everyone should be able to afford some dignity. Dignity can result in lower crime rates, less disgusting shanty compounds and more children staying in school. The shame that poverty brings on is real and can make some people think they are less than others, can result in less participation in political activities and decision making and cause poverty to just continue. Amartya Sen agrees with me. Poverty in our minds, it should end there first, I like to think all are differently gifted but equally gifted so everyone can play a role in making our nation better. So our leader must have a plan, a comprehensive plan that covers all the areas poverty roots from like bad legislation, terrible services to lack of political will in some areas. Our leader must know his people’s problems in order to fix them.

So those are my two things and in every election I will vote for those two things.