The leader of the Green Party of Zambia, Peter Sinkamba, has set out his platform for the Presidential elections of 20 January 2015: to cancel the mining licence issued to Australia’s Zambezi Resources Limited for the Lower Zambezi National Park. Reading this, the electorate will wonder what could possibly be so important about the proposed mining of a National Park. And why do the Greens consider it the single most important issue facing Zambia today? At one level the mining saga does signal dysfunctional undemocratic malgovernance, requiring a President - given the flawed Constitution handed to Kaunda by Britain that contained no safeguards against the use of excessive Executive power - who is wise and somewhat unworldy, but, above all, a visionary. The mining, which would utterly destroy Lower Zambezi, poison the Zambezi River and destroy an ecotourim industry was, after all, refused by 17 Chiefs of the Zambezi Basin – now greatly empowered by the Nagoya Protocol of the Biodiversity Convention; by the MMD Government; by Parliament’s environmental committee; by the PF Government’s own Zambia Environmental Management Agency (ZEMA), a decision later overturned by the Minister. And mining would negate Zambia’s membership of the Convention on Biological Diversity; run counter to its membership of various United Nations bodies; make impossible the declaration of a World Heritage Site joined with Mana Pools; contradict the IUCN’s definition of a National Park; and dishonour the Stockholm and Rio Declarations which bind the nations of the Zambezi Basin under a code of good environmental stewardship. The list is a long one. But are they sufficient reasons to provide a political party with a presidential candidate? Perhaps Sinkamba sees the mining issue – as do I - as a symptom of an extremely serious malaise affecting Zambia. For the mining issue removes the trousers to reveal a suppurating Zambian ulcer on the nations bottom: the continuing existence of a dictatorial, grasping Executive, uncurbed by Government, Parliament, the Judiciary or the Constitution. After all, for three years, Sata, assisted by Guy Scott and Wynter Kabimba – the A-Team as Scott referred to them – ensured the continuing Sata autocracy. For Sata answered to no one (perhaps Mugabe, his Patriotic Front chum, the only President to visit Zambia in those three years); and the A-Team were in command, plucking Harry Kalaba - a sacrificial chicken under robotic control and one of a veritable herd of Dep. Ministers – from the Office of the Vice-President and handing him the poisoned chalice of Minister of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection. On 17 January 2014, Kalaba played the A-Team card, giving permission for the mining to go ahead – ignoring his own Ministry, ZEMA, Parliament, the Chiefs, the Ministry of Tourism and Arts – that woman, supposedly in charge of the Park; ignored even the admission by his predecessor, Simuusa, that the large-scale mining licence had been issued illegally. A month later Kalaba had his Ministry provide a 7-page letter for ZEMA to send to the miners that laid out the conditions under which mining could proceed. The letter, a shockingly amateurish and irresponsible attempt to justify the unjustifiable was not made available for public discussion, and the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) has not made public the conditions under which the mining can proceed, as promised in the letter. In March, Sata removed Kalaba, replacing him with Mwansa Kapeya, the same Kapeya who acted as Government crower and lied to the Voice of America that Sata was not sick and had gone to Israel to ‘woo investors’. Kapeya then later blithely announced that land titles would soon be issued by Chiefs to their customary residents – signalling the future destruction of the traditional land tenure system, an act of unfathomable ignorance, even for a politician. The A-Team, once ensconced, soon revealed their mercantile intent, Kabimba registering the Ilunda Chalo Investment Company, publicly inviting investors to partner the PF in other companies that would be set up as needed. Obviously the A-Team in its business mode made a deal with Zambezi Resources and their Zambian subsidiary, Mwembeshi Resources - its Chairman Willie Sweta, a Zambezi Resources Limited shareholder. What deal we don’t know. But what else are we to conclude, given the arrogant confidence of the Australian miners and the High Court delaying tactics, the Minister avoiding being questioned or witnesses being allowed? And no sooner had Sata set up his trading store in State House, then he transferred the Road Development Agency (RDA) to his personal control, its first job being to construct a highway through the National Park but with no public consultation or approved EIA process – a disaster to add to the mining. Sata borrowed heavily – Zambia’s foreign debt now approaching $5 billion, bags of money heaved into the RDA account by Finance Minister, ‘Uncle’ Chikwanda, another case of misplaced ‘Executive Power’. Sata then appointed his former campaign manager Willie Nsanda as his RDA Chairman, the man who was also an advisor to the ZAWA Board, illegally acquiring a safari-hunting concession in the process. But for the next three years no RDA Board was appointed to oversee the RDA functions and so avoid a massive abuse of public funds. The RDA was later excoriated by the Auditor-General for its failure to provide environmental plans for its numerous road projects. Then it had its funds cut off, its safe broken into at a highly protected office, and potentially incriminating documents ‘stolen’. And contractors have not been paid – except those who ‘paid to be paid’. Willie Nsanda now casts desperately around for some protective political blanket as the holed PF dugout, skippered by the surviving A-Team member, Scott, his PhD in robotics failing to help him command the multitudinous Ministers without paddles to move the PF ubwato upstream. Sata then approved a landgrab, signing off the alienation of 39,000 hectares bordering the National Park – his medical doctor ‘wife’ allegedly obtaining land in the same customary area. The land was alienated under leasehold (99-year renewable) to a transporter and road builder, Iqbal Alloo - who had once obtained customary area originally inveigled out of Chief Mwape by the Petauke District Council. He obtained this land from Chief Unda Unda in the Rufunsa GMA on the northern borders of the Park, the land registered in the name of his company, Sable Transport Limited. Alloo then entered into an arrangement with REDD+ commercial and donor-aid interests. As theredddesk.org informs us: The project area for the Lower Zambezi REDD+ Project (Rufunsa Conservancy) is privately owned by Sable Transport Ltd. A Memorandum of Understanding carbon rights agreement has been signed by Sable Transport Ltd and BioCarbon Partners Ltd, providing BCP with the right to manage, implement, and benefit from a REDD+ project in the Conservancy. There are currently no specific laws in Zambia dealing with carbon rights. However, the landowner has the rights to above and below ground biomass. Land tenure within the project zone is customary areas, which is under de facto ownership and management of local communities and the Chief. However, de jure ownership over land and trees is vested in the President of the Republic of Zambia. As I wrote in my forthcoming book, Out of Zambia: There is a massive contradiction in this statement as land that has been alienated is no longer customary area. The alienated land is now ‘leased’ to a consortium of donors, NGOs and Government agencies: being funded by USAID, and carried out under a cooperative agreement by BioCarbon Partners. Also involved are the Forestry Department, ZAWA, ZEMA (who required no EIA for the project), MUSIKA - (who did not reply to my queries) an agricultural markets NGO trained by USAID and funded by Swedish Aid (SIDA), UNDP and African Management Services Company (UNDP/AMSCO), Engineers Without Borders Canada, and Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) – who are coupled with the Business Initiative Facility (DFID/BIF). My attempts to obtain clarification from USAID and CIFOR were unsuccessful. As a backdrop to this crime against customary people, the International Tribunal for the Rights of Nature meeting took place on 5 and 6 December 2014 in Lima, the judges referring ‘to the Rights of Nature and the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth, from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010’. Here they explained the case against REDD as follows (the difference between REDD and REDD+ is simply the addition of the conservation of forest carbon stocks; the sustainable management of forests; and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks): REDD (Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) is a global initiative to create a financial value for the carbon stored in native forests and tree plantations, soils and agriculture, including plankton and algae in the oceans. This involves the opening of the carbon cycling capacity of the Earth to economic valuation and trading in financial market systems. Indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, small farmers and peasants view REDD as a false solution for mitigating climate change that have resulted in land grabs, evictions and human rights abuses. REDD is inherently about commodifying and privatizing air, trees and land by selling nature and air to generate permits to pollute. These permits to pollute also known as carbon or emission credits are used by polluters to avoid reducing greenhouse gas emissions at source. This Tribunal on REDD and forests will listen to testimonies on the concern of REDD and other carbon and emissions trading and offset regimes violating the rights established in the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. Another reason for the Green Party to adopt the mining issue as its platform, is that mining and industrial farming, in its obscene need for electric power, has given rise to the rape of the Zambezi and other rivers for hydro power, impoverishing customary people and the wildlife who depend on them, ecosystem services being criminally diminished by the day. All of this at a time when the Biodiversity Convention in its Global Biodiversity Outlook 3, concluded that since 1970: ‘The population of wild vertebrate species fell … in the tropics by 59% and in freshwater ecosystems by 41%’. And Outlook 4 concluding that industrial agriculture ‘is one of the greatest threats to natural ecosystems and biodiversity’. And our 10,000 or so rhino are extinct, and our elephant are down to about 20,000 from a population in excess of 350,000 at Independence. As Sinkamba knows better than most, the electricity generated from our absolutely priceless heritage goes to industries that pay little tax and export concentrate at non-market prices, and who pollute and destroy nature and the livelihoods of rural people. And they do not do business for very long – the reason moles must forage ever further afield. The minerals when mined become no more, period. But the rivers in the process are irreducibly trashed. Another reason, I would hope, for putting the mining up in lights, is that the Greens need to expose the fact that consumer capitalism is dying, and that therefore Zambia should adjust its thinking; for we live in a world of declining resources, one increasingly prone to Liebig’s Law where the amount that a species or ecosystem can produce in a given place and time is limited by the resource in shortest supply - something politicians fail to understand. The cataclysmic year 2008 signalled an economic meltdown in the world. Now machines and software take over blue-collar jobs, and manufacturing is in decline. As Paul Mason wrote in the New Statesman, ‘Unless whole new industries based on whole new sources of economic demand grow up, the purchasing power of the majority will fall; and ultimately there is only so much money you can print, and only so many asset bubbles you can stimulate, until it comes to a full stop’. Ask why 30 – 70,000 old age pensioners in the U.K. die annually because they cannot afford heating bills, and why many thousands require food handouts. As I wrote in Out of Zambia: While Zambia chases the impossible dream of becoming a middle-income country based on employers, jobs and exports, 40 percent of mankind is already moving on from the First Industrial Revolution and through the Second Industrial Revolution to the Third – the revolution of the Internet world of the collaborative-commons, of an open commons knowledge-based society, where, unlike proprietary capitalism, people both make contributions and extractions from the pool, freeing themselves increasingly from the industrial and financial straitjacket, from being neoliberal wage slaves bereft of their land and ever part of the perennial working poor. As Leadbeater remarked, ‘Web culture is reviving older, pre-industrial forms of organisation that in the developed world were sidelined by industrialisation’. In much of the undeveloped world these pre-industrial ideas are alive and well. In Zambia we have our customary villages and ichima work groups of women, we have the world of the city compounds where few have a job or an employer, just people indulging in age-old patterns of trade and barter; the barter of free men before slavery, before invasion, colonisation and mega-comercialisation; what an irony! In the light of this the Sixth National Development Plan’s goal for Zambia of being a prosperous middle-income country by 2030 is simply ludicrous when you consider that manufacturing is already entombed by neoliberalism and globalisation. The SNDP’s vision to involve 50,000 women in fundamentally dishonest REDD+ projects, build 30 dams and irrigations systems, and develop an additional three farming blocks – presumably taken from customary people who will now become factory workers on the farms – is a repeat of failed previous attempts - archaeologically significant irrigation projects littering Northern Province. For mining it lists the mid-Zambezi uranium mines as coming into production – for which no strategic EIA has been conducted, let alone full environmental management plans – as a UNESCO/IUCN mission discovered - mandatory for the issue of prospecting and large-scale mining licences. ZEMA and Zambia are woefully unqualified to deal with the environmental effects of the proposed uranium mining upstream of the Park and the management of the radiation and its very serious genetic impacts on people. Brugge & Buchner of Tufts University in 2011 concluded that ‘the strong biological plausibility of adverse effects on the brain, on reproduction, including estrogenic effects, on gene expression, and on uranium metabolism’ will not only affect mine workers but also villagers living near uranium mines and processing facilities. They ended on a chilling note, ‘As much damage is irreversible, and possibly cumulative’. In addition, no strategic socio-environmental impact study has been made of the State’s past and present programmes; nor has there been given any thought to maintaining the integrity of Zambia’s cultural and religious heritage, the State opting – under the control of the WB/IMF, and with the tacit support of the Co-operating Partners, to continue on down the path of land alienation, mining, debt creation and agro-industrial development, with ever more plans to dam and irrigate. In 2013 the PF Party had announced a revision of the SNDP to more closely fit the PF Manifesto; now yet another ‘development in 90-day’ lie. The PF Manifesto itself, to which I had made a small contribution, is simply not fit for purpose. The road the PF has chosen to follow – and taken by all previous Governments - continues on down to the wasteland. They totally ignore the need for a fund into which mining revenues could be placed and shared with Government and Zambians – as is done in Alaska, and which Kabimba had once requested me to establish but then forgot about. Future generations will inherit an impoverished country if the multi-party winner-take-all politics is allowed to proceed unchecked under a flawed Constitution, one which Zambians are not allowed to change through political subterfuge. And as well, Sata and his A-Team did not put right, as they promised to do – therefore making the PF unfit to govern again, the utterly disgraceful abrogation by Kaunda of the Barotse Agreement 1964 – to his everlasting shame. It is time to seek an alternative way. The Green Party, with the Lower Zambezi National Park as its platform, has certainly provided a litmus test for the future.