By now you should have known that presidential nominations for the forthcoming 20 September 2011 elections were filed last week. You should have known this unless you have been living in a cave for the last couple of months or you care less about what happens in this nation. At which point your ignorance can be excused. There were 10 presidential candidates who successfully filed in their nominations even though I was only expecting three. I am still wondering where on earth the excess baggage come from.
The Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) had earlier announced that there were 17 candidates who were going to file in nominations. I thought to myself what manner of madness am I bearing witness to. I know this is a democratic nation and it is their right to stand for presidency but some of them needed to be slapped back to their senses. There were parties of all kind of names and manifestos. Some had manifestos that they were a youth party, so what? While some borrowed ideas from their grade 12 history class of Karl Marx. I thought the ECZ did an injustice by lowering the nomination fee from K20 million to K10 million. In fact I had hoped that they would have actually increased it to some colossal sum like K50 million to get rid of the chaff.
When the filing in of nominations was drawing to a close I breathed a sigh of relief when I learnt that seven candidates had dropped out. Even though they gave pathetic excuses that they had decided to support another particular party instead or that they opted to stand not in these elections but the next ones. Duh so you only realised this on the day you were supposed to lodge in your nominations get serious? The fact of the matter is that some where just plain broke, could not salvage the necessary 200 supporters not even relatives were willing and some just wanted free publicity. Therefore, we were left with the inconvenience of only seven others.
I mean let’s be honest here there are only 3 candidates with a realistic chance of winning the elections. I would bet my arm on that one. My question to the other candidates is mwenze kuti? When the other three candidates were busy campaigning and talking about each other only falling short of ‘Yo Momma’ jokes where were you? I did not see any rallies, I did not hear you on radio, apart from the occasional short appearance in The Post Newspaper you were nowhere. In fact you would have gone to Russia for 10 years and I wouldn’t have noticed you were missing.
My point is that it is time some of our presidential candidates realised that they are just not popular enough, or they were not blessed with the charisma to get people like me voting for them. The sooner they put down those motivational books with clichéd titles like ‘It Is Always Possible,’ ‘Dream Big,’ or ‘You Are A Winner’ the better it will be for the rest of us. There may be some genuine high caliber candidates among the excess seven but these as well need to get dirty and work for the presidency. The eloquent rhetoric bombardilistic words are not for this bloke. Get back to the grind and let us enjoy the real 3 presidential candidates talk about national issues and each other as I wait for a ‘Yo Momma’ joke to come out of one of them.
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