IN ABOUT two weeks, Zambia will join the rest of Mother Earth in bid-ding farewell to the year 2013 and saying hello to 2014.
But as we make the transition, it would be worthwhile to count our blessings both as ordinary citizens and leaders of a country as we thrive to make Zambia a better place to live for our children and our children’s children.
As a public owned newspaper we have thrived to do the best we can give various conflicting national interest views that so often scream for equal or part space. It’s a delicate balancing act.
We know the public’s right to know rises above everything else in this crucial duty just as well as we know that you cannot please everybody every time; it’s a catch 22 to use the cliché but what we have tried to do is remain professional.
What we know for sure, however, above everything else is the fact that our duty to inform the nation about the developmental projects the PF government under President Sata have and plan to embark on in future is unfathomable – it is without fathom.
It is our duty to keep reminding Zambians that even as pockets of pov-erty continue to exist, signs of development are all over the country and cannot go without being mentioned.
It is our duty to remind Zambians that after years of dilapidation and neglect, there now is a government that is keen to start developing an 8,000 nation-wide road network that has employed thousands of peo-ple.
We are duty-bound to illustrate, in clear terms, that once the road net-work for instance has been opened up or rolled out, development shall go to the opened up areas earlier impassible and unfriendly to devel-opment.
Our country presently stands as one of the few tourism-rich countries on the continent without its own airline but lately we have seen Presi-dent Sata launch the erection of a $350 million KK International Airport project.
Thousands of jobs yet again will be created while the new airport will inevitably attract dozens of aircrafts to Zambia (money too) that previ-ously could not land in Lusaka due to the small size of our current air-port.
But perhaps of even greater significance is the fact that the government has a grand plan to roll out a national airline so that Zambia can fly high once again – the prospects of greater tourism are just too great to fath-om if this happened.
Now we have heard critics slam government in and out of opposition for borrowing and allegedly locking the younger generation, the unborn children to future debt due to the borrowing.
We think this is a wrong kind of thinking especially in the absence of an opposition solution it’s unproductive and even retrogressive.
What we have seen – and unless we are wrong – is that the government is borrowing for production and development unlike the past when bor-rowing was for consumption or for buying something at an inflated price.
How wrong can this be? If we don’t borrow today to build roads and bridges and universities the consequences, in our view, could even be dire and by dire we mean a future generation without the necessary in-frastructure to prop them into the future.
If we don’t borrow today we risk having a generation that shall blame us for having not prepared them adequately because we were afraid what the opposition would think.
The route President Sata has taken to build and build heavy or rather invest in the future is a good route – it needs commendation and sup-port and heckling and armchair criticism.
If at all there are flaws in the manner he is going about it and there is evidence to that, the best thing to do is to advise him on the correct way to do it and not create a public spectacle that gives the impression that the government knows not what it is doing.
As we bid farewell to 2013 and once again say hello to the good year of the Lord 2014 let us remain focused and united in development and unity.
United we stand and divided we fall.
DailyMail