CADREISM and it being a source of living has been a topical issue since the New Dawn Administration formed government in August this year.
It all started with the presidential directive to weed out cadres from the management of markets, bus stations and other public places, a trend which was common in the past.
In basic terms, cadres are defined as a group of activists in a communist or any other revolutionary organisation to champion the cause of their grouping.
Zambian laws do not provide for political cadres running the daily management of trading spaces, meaning that President Hakainde Hichilema was in order to abolish the practice and restore sanity.
However, there is another aspect of life as a political party cadre which revolves around cash handouts or any other form of freebee from the powers that be as a means of living.
Leaders from the level of president to the ward or branch chairperson are often looked up to as the source whenever they visit a location or visited at their office.
It is such an expectation that caused Vice-President W.K Mutale-Nalumango to speak out on the matter when she visited Lusaka’s Kanyama township yesterday.
Ms Nalumango was in the area for a potential flood risk assessment by the Disaster Management and Mitigation Unit (DMMU) when she encountered a visible expectation from the United Party for National Development (UPND) cadres that welcomed her.
She advised the youths to enroll in trade schools to acquire survival skills because the party will not be dishing out money as a means to facilitate their survival.
We welcome the vice-president’s stance because the life of handouts is unsustainable and generates a sense of laziness in one actualising the potential to fend for themselves.
The trend for the party in power dishing out money to cadres should be discouraged because this could be a harbinger of public fund abuse which strains national coffers.
We therefore encourage the New Dawn Government to focus its energies on capacitating people to earn money through hard work.
We are glad that Ms Mutale-Nalumango reminded the young people that the Government promised them jobs and that this will done through structured empowerment.
The increased financial allocation to the Constituency Development Fund (CDF) from K1.6 million to K25.7 million is already a step towards rightly realising the empowerment of local people including the youth.
Our call is therefore, for people at community level to position themselves for economic activity participation so that initiatives such as the CDF become meaningful.