When the Patriotic Front (PF) won the 2011 general elections, I took time to dissect and analyse various appointments President Michael Sata had made to his government – from Cabinet Ministers, State House aides, Defense & Security Chiefs, Permanent Secretaries, Constitutional Officers, Heads of Commissions and Regulatory Boards, CEOs of parastatal entities and all the way to Ambassadors and High Commissioners. I found the new government to be reeking of tribalism and regionalism to its last pore. I found this to be quite detrimental to the spirit of our “One Zambia, One Nation” motto.
I was prompted to delve into the archives and examine similar appointments made by our former Presidents – Dr. Kenneth Kaunda, Frederick Chiluba, Patrick Mwanawasa and Rupiah Banda. Unlike Sata who had recklessly allocated all the lofty positions to people from one particular region, his predecessors had at least made an attempt to bring every tribe or region on board, including what we may refer to as the minority groups. I found this to be polarising…..a danger to this nation!
There and then, I decided to write an article, “Sata’s Family Forest Explained” in which I explicitly exposed the extent of tribalism and regionalism in Sata’s government. To think that we’d have a government largely populated by one particular region was nauseating……nay shocking! It went viral on social media.
As anticipated, the article did not sit well with those in authority; particularly one Edgar Chagwa Lungu who served as Home Affairs Minister at the time. I hadn’t seen a person so annoyed on national TV before.
“This is treason!” He bellowed as he banged his mahogany office desk with his clenched fist. “We know this is the work of UPND. I am directing investigative wings of government to hunt down whoever is behind this article and bring them to book!”
I smiled as I watched these theatrics on ZNBC 19:00 hours main news. Seeing this, my wife and David, a volunteer from England we were hosting in our home, wondered why I seemed to be pleased. I switched on my laptop and showed them the article that aroused so much controversy.
“So, you wrote this Uncle Bill….” the young man shrieked as he popped out his eyes in utter shock. “They’ll obviously send you to jail…..”
I wasn’t gonna sit idle and wait for the men in dark suits and sunglasses to drag me away to the slammer! In wee hours of the following day, I found my passport, placed it in one of the inner pockets of my coat and slipped away. Destination? Anywhere I could evade the dragnet and be safe for a while…..perhaps, deep into the thickets.
“In case you see any strange looking fellows knocking on our door asking about my whereabouts, don’t hesitate to alert me so I can skip the border,” I had earlier intimated to my wife as I bade her farewell.
As I wandered in the wilderness surviving on wild fruits and mice if I was lucky, I resolved to write this book one day and put these things into a better perspective.
Fortunately enough for me, the investigative wings failed to join the dots and link the article to me. This came as a relief to me as I knew I we were dealing with a brutal regime which could have joyfully dumped me into the cooler on bogus charges and thrown away the keys! As they say, the rest is of course water under the bridge.
Anyway, as fate would have it, Lungu somehow found himself sitting in the colonial mansion at Plot 1 Independence Avenue. At a time when many political pundits and observers expected the new leader to break with the past and do things differently, he had no qualms continuing on the same trajectory! He even took things to another level by allowing his senior government and party officials to take pleasure in denigrating and making tribal remarks against a certain ethnic grouping as he looked the other way!
Was Lungu one of the architects of tribalism in the PF administration? This reminded me of the passage in Chinua Achebe’s book, Things Fall Apart, “An old woman is always uneasy when dry bones are mentioned in a proverb.” How come he was so agitated with the article?
Fast forward, August 2021 came and UPND’s Hakainde Hichilema is the new President. As he settled down on his new job, we implored him to avoid making the same mistakes as the PF administration and urged him to put together a government that would represent our national character and further embolden our motto “One Zambia, One Nation!”
Has he performed better than his predecessor? By all fair accounts, President Hichilema has assembled a government that represents a national character – every region of our country has found room in his government.
This book presents practical answers to every inquisitive reader or indeed citizen. Please take time to enjoy the book and make your own comparisons before you jump to any conclusions.
Prince Bill M Kaping’a