“When imperialists begin to clap for you, know that you have sold your people out”

IMPERIALISTS CELEBRATE HAKAINDE HICHILEMA

By Moses Lutelo

We in Zambia are far more familiar with what is happening in our country than any foreign newspaper can ever be. We live here. We endure it. And from this position of lived reality, we can assure the world that President Hakainde Hichilema does not qualify to be placed on any list of prominent or exemplary leaders.

The decision by The Telegraph to celebrate Hakainde Hichilema is not only misguided. It is an insult to the people of Zambia.

In 2025, Zambia lost its Sixth President, Dr Edgar Chagwa Lungu. Instead of allowing the nation and the family to mourn with dignity, Hakainde Hichilema chose ego over humanity. When the Lungu family opted for a private funeral, Hichilema responded with litigation. He sued the former First Lady in a court in Pretoria, weaponising the law against a grieving widow. Months later, the family remains unable to bury their loved one. This is egotistic and narcissistic behaviour. A secure leader does not torment a bereaved family. A narcissist does.

While this cruelty unfolded at the top, ordinary Zambians were sinking deeper into hardship.

For the last three years, Zambia has endured up to 20 hours of load shedding daily. This is not a temporary crisis. It is a sustained national failure. Entire livelihoods have been destroyed over a prolonged period, not weeks or months, but years. Small businesses collapsed long ago. Barbers, welders, tailors, bakers, salons, butcheries, internet cafés, and workshops did not merely struggle. They died. Medicines spoiled. Cold rooms failed. Students grew up studying by candlelight. Families learned to live in permanent darkness while electricity continued to be exported outside the country. When citizens cried out, they were mocked and told to “buy solar panels”, a statement that exposed not just incompetence, but contempt.

This is not leadership. It is indifference.

As if that was not enough, farmers have been abandoned. Halfway into the rain season, many farmers have not received farming inputs. Those who supplied maize to the Food Reserve Agency are still unpaid, months later. These are not abstract statistics. These are families pushed into debt, hunger, and despair by a state that makes promises and breaks them without shame.

At the same time, state violence has become normalised. In Northwestern Province, Hakainde Hichilema unleashed the police on Zambian youths engaged in small-scale gold mining on their own land. More than 30 young people were killed. Instead of remorse, the President justified the killings. The same brutality was repeated at Senseli Mine in Chingola. Zambian lives were treated as expendable in the protection of resource interests.

Then came the constitutional collapse. Hakainde Hichilema systematically captured the judiciary and the legislature. With institutions subdued, Bill 7 was forced into law in open defiance of precedent, procedure, and even after the Constitutional Court ruled against it. This was executive arrogance on full display. Power concentrated. Checks dismantled. The Constitution reduced to an inconvenience.

Alongside this has been the unbridled arrest and persecution of opposition politicians. Detention has become punitive, not judicial. Patriotic Front and Tonse Alliance Secretary General Honourable Raphael Mangani Nakacinda has been jailed for 18 months based on a law that was repealed 2 years ago. Others such as Munir Zulu, even after serving court-imposed sentences, they remain imprisoned. This is not the rule of law. It is political vengeance masquerading as justice.

Worse still, rampant tribalism has taken root in diplomatic services and government institutions. Appointments increasingly reflect ethnic loyalty rather than competence or national unity. The state has been hollowed out and repurposed to serve a narrow inner circle. This is not the Zambia many fought for. It is a fractured nation managed through patronage and propaganda.

Put together, these are not the signs of a reforming democracy. They are the symptoms of a fallen state, one that survives not on delivery but on propaganda. Not on justice, but on narrative control. Not on unity, but on fear and division.

And yet The Telegraph finds the moral fibre to celebrate this man. Samora Machel warned us long ago: when imperialists begin to clap for you, know that you have sold your people out. That warning echoes loudly today.