Dr M’membe calls for urgent resolution to the Luvale-Lunda conflict
OPPOSITION Socialist Party has called for urgent solutions to end the embarrassing Luvale-Lunda conflict in Zambezi.
In a statement to newsdayzambia.com Party 2021 candidate Dr Fred M’membe said the apparently intractable conflict between the Luvale and Lunda people in Zambezi was demoralizing.
Dr M’membe said beyond destabilising the families and communities, it tended to perpetuate the very conditions of misery and hate that contributed to it in the first place.
He said the Luvale, Lunda, Luchazi and Chokwe – are one people with a common origin and they all came here from southern Congo, just above the North Western Province in 1800.
“Where is this animosity, hate, conflict coming from? What purpose does it serve? Who is benefiting from it? Why have our leaders – political, traditional, religious or otherwise – failed to resolve this conflict over the years?” asked Dr M’membe
Dr M’membe said the conflict resolution should be easy.
“A conflict that has become intractable should be especially easy to resolve through such interventions. After all, a conflict with no end in sight serves the interests of very few people, drains both parties’ resources, wastes energy, and diminishes human capital in service of a futile endeavour,” he said.
He added that even a compromise solution that only partially addresses the salient needs and interests of the parties should be embraced when they realise that such a compromise represents a far better deal than pursuing a self-defeating pattern of behaviour that offers them nothing but aversive outcomes with a highly uncertain prospect of goal attainment.
“Conflict resolution, of course, is at times anything but easy. To be sure, many antagonistic encounters stemming from incompatible interests are short-lived and run their course without causing irreparable damage to either party. But a small portion of relationships that are mired
in conflict become protracted affairs, to the point of seeming intractability. Such conflicts can be extremely detrimental and become self-sustaining, displaying marked resistance to intervention even in the face of rational considerations that would seemingly defuse the animosities at work,” Said Dr M’membe
Dr M’membe mentioned that this imperviousness to rationality suggests that the problem of intractability had more about psychology than objective reality.
“An intractable conflict is one that has become entrenched in cognitive, affective, and social-structural mechanisms, a transformation that effectively distances the conflict from the perceived incompatibilities that launched it.
“This transformation can occur in conflicts in marriages, in work settings, between political groups in communities, and even between warring nations. As a conflict becomes a primary focus of each party’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, even factors that are irrelevant to the conflict become framed in a way that intensifies or maintains the conflict. It is as though the conflict acts like a gravity well into which the surrounding mental, behavioural, and social-structural landscape begins to slide,” he said
Dr M’membe said once parties were trapped in such a well, escape required tremendous will and energy.
