President
Sata doesn’t matter even when his decisions or position on national issues
shows bad luck in thinking or lacks relevance. Much of the costly decisions he has
taken show gut impulse and leaves one wondering whether he questions his
actions with the same vigour he used to criticise government during his ten years
spent in opposition politics
By Nyalubinge Ngwende
It is only when people start feeling the effects of putting into
public office leaders who do silly things that they come to their senses, and
start seeing how bad their choices in voting can really be.
It is even much painful when people start accepting that the
previous leadership they disdained and voted out of office was more intelligent,
more open and fair in handling national issues than a tyrannical leadership of demagogues
they elected.
That is exactly an absurd situation the Zambian citizens,
especially the learned elite, have found themselves in, barely two years after
ushering into office President Michael Sata of the Patriotic Front (PF).
Even the poor who only make sense about how bad their voting
was by economic policies failing to distribute agriculture inputs on time,
staple meal shortages or price hikes and increased school fees, are regretting
their September 2011 election choice of the PF.
One does not need to go farther than the Zambia People’s Pact
(ZPP), a FaceBook social media. Born
after the collapse of a political pact between opposition United Party for National
Development (UPND) and PF, ZPP was a forum of Zambians within and abroad who
weighed themselves as progressive citizens who needed to push out what they
considered as a bad government of Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) and
President Rupiah Banda.
The social media had Panji Kaunda, eldest son of first
Republican President Kenneth Kaunda as patron. Its agenda was to see the PF,
led by Sata who had for 10 years mobilised his party into a strong opposition, takeover
power. Opinions against PF were almost 2 to 8 on the run to the September 20,
2011 elections, and if you dared to attack Sata’s ineligibility to run the
country efficiently you wished you did not try—the amount of rapacious attacks
and insults that flied off the social media just made one feel small. The
social media was also an opinion room for who was the most popular presidential
candidate, and definitely Sata led the poll.
When elections came PF won with resounding victory and the
social media continued with its praises, turning its vengeance onto a freelance
journalist Chanda Chimba III engaged by the MMD government during the run to
elections to produce a ‘Stand Up Zambia’ television program and its weekly
print version to ferret out Sata’s past misdeeds and warn the people against
voting him into office. They all wanted Chanda Chimba jailed for defaming Sata,
sadly the case that went to court was abuse of public funds.
Posts on ZPP were full of hope that the man of action Sata was
going to deliver. I remember personally differing with Proud Aushi Musamba and
Tina Banda, who were prominent on ZPP and part of the admin on the page for
telling them that President Sata had too much baggage of weaknesses and lacked
the intellectual judgment to efficiently run the country. I laboured so much to
convince Peter Sinkamba, the secretary of ZPP, that President Sata was not the
right Presidential material Zambia needed to sustain the economic strides that
country had managed so far.
Panji Kaunda is now deputy minister of transport in Sata’s
government and hardly appears on ZPP. Tina Banda is no longer active on ZPP—concentrating
on her online help room ‘Ask Aunt Tina’, the secretary of the group PeterSinkamba left to form his Green Party while Proud Aushi Musamba is now a
prominent member of the Zambia Eye, an Online publication that is critical of
President Sata and the PF.
Lately Musamba has joined ‘Team GBM’, ostensibly an
imaginative coalition sympathising with Geoffrey Bwalya Mwamba, the defence
minister who resigned from government to stand on the side of his uncle Henry
Sosala. Sosala is being tormented by President Sata who does not want him to be
enthroned as Paramount Chief Chitimukulu of the Bemba speaking people of
Northern Zambia. GBM is seen by his supporters and some Bemba loyalists as a
symbol of courage that has ever challenged President Sata to his face.
The fall out between GBM and Sata came after the former defence
minister visited his uncle-chief in Kasama, the provincial headquarters of
Northern Zambia dominantly inhabited by the Bemba speaking people. When
intelligence on the ground informed Sata that his minister was visiting Sosala,
a person the Head of State has a tiff with, Sata is reported to have made a
call asking GBM to choose between him and the Chitimukulu-elect. GBM chose the
Chitimukulu-elect and resigned his ministerial position saying ‘he would not
abandon family over a political position that is only given’.
Apparently, leading to this, President Sata had withdrew the
recognition of Henry Sosala as senior chief Mwamba of the Bemba people on
flimsy grounds that the he did not follow certain rituals to ascend to the
throne.
The Bashi Lubemba, a composition of custodians of the
culture, seems to have not agreed with the President. As when the time came to
fill the vacant throne of the Paramount Chief Chitimukulu, they chose dethroned
Sosala to take the most revered of traditional positions among the Bembas of
Northern Zambia. President Sata immediately sent a battalion of police officers
to surround the house of Henry Sosala, seemingly in a militant way of stopping
the chief-elect from conducting the traditional procession to his palace in
Mungwi, a town not far from Kasama.
Intellectual
Humility
 |
| President Michael Sata |
The GBM/Sosala saga and many other decisions that President
Sata has made, shows Zambia today is in the hands of reckless leadership,
lacking most ingredients of good sense in handling national affairs. The
confidence of being in the saddle of leadership lacks in President Michael
Sata, who took over power from Rupiah Banda after winning the September 2011
elections.
This lack of confidence makes the President to disrespect opposition
leaders, who are asking him to uphold fairness through rule of law on matters
of national interest. He treats advice from other opposition leaders with
kindergarten contempt, the kind that ignores the relevant alternative viewpoints
being raised. Sometimes one sits to wonder if our President is a strong-sense
thinker or the direct opposite.
I am told strong-sense thinkers question the purposes and
implications of their actions with the same vigour that they question those of
others. But this is not the case, as seen with the recent altercation President
Sata had with opposition United Party for National Development (UPND) leader
Hakainde Hichilema.
HH, as the UPND leader is known by his initials, wrote
President Sata to carefully handle the matters of traditional rulers like the
one of the Chitimukulu. Sata responded in a language that does not befit a
statesman, describing the opposition leader as ‘useless and
unconstructive’.
“We acknowledge receipt of your useless,
unconstructive letter dated 27th December 2013; and we don’t owe
anybody an apology for your useless actions. For your own information, chiefs
fall under the Republican President and not HH or UPND. Therefore we are not going to be reckless on
the appointment of Paramount Chief Chitimukulu of the Bemba speaking people.
You are free to appoint him as your paramount chief”.
It beats any strong-thinker why President Sata failed
to see the advice of HH in a positive light and use it to reflect whether his
anger towards the Chitimukulu-elect is rational.
It is not just HH who has been hit with President
Sata’s anger and misreading of issues, but it is surprising that his public
anger and open calling of his own appointees ‘Ichipuwa’—fool has just been a
matter of laughter in the media and public discourse instead of critical
analysis of the President’s personality. Some ministers have just laughed it
off that their boss is difficult, but never want to fully understand what makes
him to be so. Is it that GMB could not stand the President’s tongue-lashing
that made him to resign? If it is, then GBM is a much courageous man among
others who claim to be educated but lack character to stand against being
bullied in public.
Intellectual
Courage
The rest of the letter dated December 30, 2013 to HH signed
by President Sata lacked intellectual humility—failing to shift from his narrow
understanding about what constitutes leaders. He lectures HH about leadership
in a way that is not educated.
“I sympathise and feel sorry for you have never been
elected or nominated as councillor nor have you ever been nominated or elected
as Member of Parliament, therefore your Leadership is more of Guess Work than
anything else.”
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| Sata embrace with opposition UPND leader HH |
Talking the irrelevance about what he thinks should be
permanent trajectory to leadership positions shows Sata’s serious problems of
lacking courage to challenge his narrow perceptions or ideas of what leadership
is. How, surely, can leadership be only about becoming a councillor and being
nominated or elected as MP?
When the large number of the country, including the
traditional custodians of the Bemba culture, has differed with President Sata
over the issue of Chitimukulu, he still fails to see the implications of the
problem he is creating. It takes an intellectual mind, with courage, to realise
their faults in any discourse and take the courage to accept they are wrong. Sata
is yet to show that courage and start looking to give fair hearing to his
opponents and the electorate which has been largely lacking thus far.
Well it does not just end at political silliness. The
country’s economic decisions are being formulated not from careful analysis and
appeal to good reason. More of what we are seeing today is economic pronouncements
bordering on gut impulses, lacking space to do things within the simple
principles of economics—scarce resources, which require prioritising choices.
Unguided development agenda with unplanned projects being
launched every other day has led to fiscal deficit and dwindling international
reserves, as Alexander Chikwanda becomes a Finance Minister with the most
signatures on borrowed money in Africa in just within two years of serving
government.
As a result the country is slowly sliding back into
unsustainable debt, causing the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to warn the
country about the consequences of the gut impulse economics, charging that
Zambia’s current fiscal stance is clearly unsustainable and risks pushing the
debt to over 50 percent by 2018 from the current net present value of about 30
percent of GDP in 2013.
The USA based lending institution says, Zambia’s projected
growth of between 7 and 8 percent GDP and an expected reduction in inflation
could be unlikely if fiscal misconduct and unfriendly business policies remain
unattended into in the medium term.
With the government showing less respect for borrowing, IMF
advises that there will be need for the country to mobilize additional domestic
revenue, realigning spending priorities, and creating fiscal space for
infrastructure investment, while also maintaining a business environment that
encourages job creation if teh country’s growth is to remain around 7 percent.
The bank seriously doubts the credibility of the fundamental
administrative and institutional reforms and policy implementation.
There is fear that Zambia has completely veered off its
budgeted funds, overspent the 2013 allocations and was now depleting the
Central Bank finances that are intended for cash management.
It warned that this could lead to a substantial accumulation
of arrears or reliance on central bank financing.
“In this regard, the IMF staff expressed concern about the
recourse to central bank bridge loans, which are intended to assist with cash
management but could if not quickly paid back constitute central bank financing
of the budget.”
Intellectual
Perseverance
While money is always scarce in an economy and one has to
make choices where to put it and get the best value—that has not been the case
of the Zambian President today. Creating bureaucratic structures, new administrative
centres and paying salaries for civil service with intangible value to the
improvement of service delivery have been his priorities. With a group of
cadres who think winning an election is an end to push aside all rigorous
reasoning and finding easy way out, the President is ready to spend huge sums
on his ministers to go round the country and parrot his views. Surprising even
the once respected Post Newspaper has joined the parroting in its long
editorials in favour of these decisions despite the relevance of such arguments
lacking clear purpose, a sign of failure for rigorous economic thinking to come
up with policies.
Zambia is also a country where citizens have never worried about
anything when it comes to handover of power from one leader to another after
elections, but it is a country that has suffered considerably from the misuse of
that power by its Presidents.
And this time around the country is not just suffering from
abuse of power, but they are even denied any opportunity to engage their
President in an intelligent discourse to seek reasonable answers from him on
national issues.
For a President leading a political party that came into
office on the promise that it would reconcile the nation and deliver a good
constitution that has eluded the Southern African nation of13 million people
since the 1990s, failing to do that must take think tanks and media owners to
sit down and analyse where the real problems lie.
A number of President Sata’s supporters who use the online
social media are saying this is not the kind of Sata they voted for.
Sata knows that Zambians do not take kindly to tyrants, and
since he cannot risk taking his government to that end, surely there must be
personal problems he has with issues of delivering the governance that he made
everyone believe he was capable of. These are personal problems that those who
supported him were so blinded to see, but made him to do things in the past that
people like
Chanda Chimba the III remind us that our President today was not
supposed to be given a mandate to become one. What is wrong with Sata, as seen
now, are not about the things he is doing because of the position of leadership
he holds or has held before in UNIP and MMD, but something that about him that
cannot be changed. And that what cannot be changed about Sata will not go away
by people trusting him.
Intellectual
Integrity
This simply means resonating with the standards one expects
others to meet. It measures how disciplined one is about what they say and
following it with exact actions. Simply put, it is about ‘walking the walk’ by
practicing what one advocates for.
When he saw an opportunity for the things that Zambians were
demanding from the MMD like the constitution and respect for human rights, Sata
jumped on those opportunities and parroted the voices that genuine civil
activists raised against the MMD regime.
The Oasis Forum, which is a consortium of church mother
bodies and civil society, are one such body that today must be regretting
having allowed the stranger in the manger. What is even sad is that President
Sata today describes the same civil society groups as hijackers with reckless
actions for demanding that he respects the terms of reference he gave the
Technical Committee (TC) formulating the constitution. He has forgotten how the
civil society and church leadership under the Oasis forum helped him to get the
glare of national acceptance, pretending to be with them on their cause.
A former Catholic Priest who is now turned politician, Fr
Frank Bwalya, stood with President Sata and was widely quoted in the Post Newspaper
disparaging President Rupiah Banda during the run to 2011 election campaigns.
Just after winning, Sata gave him a position as chairman for Zambia’s state
electricity enterprise, ZESCO.
Shortly, Bwalya resigned over what he described as
frustrations in the manner things were being done at ZESCO. Immediately he
formed his own political party Alliance for a Better Zambia (ABZ). He has been
critical of President Sata, recently describing him as ‘Cumbu Mushololwa’, a
Bemba language jibe meaning a person who cannot take advice like a crooked
sweet potato that can’t be straightened unless it breaks. Bwalya was in no time
lifted from the Radio Mano in Kasama were he used the silly jibe by state
police and now faces charges of defaming the president.
The large support that the PF government had garnered from
the church and within the civil society has diminished. Opinion polls on leadership style have hit
the lowest ebb for President Sata, with the Catholic Church priests who had
used every Sunday sermon to plead to Zambians to vote for him in 2011 now left
with no option but to start praying that 2016 general elections come quickly to
have him removed. Bishop Teresphor Mpundu who was vocal against the Rupiah
Banda government has embarrassingly disappeared from newspapers as newsmaker.
In short Sata so far has proved a problem with intellectual
integrity, humility courage and perseverance.
He has failed to hold himself to the same standards he held MMD
leadership to, wants to win every argument at the expense of proved reason,
refusing to see things outside his perception and ignoring the complexities of
economic dictates.
Most Zambians feel he has failed to be accountable to the
people who voted for him into office by refusing to call for a press conference
three years into government so that he can be put to a test.
Next time, every Zambian voter must have a check list of intellectual
qualities for each presidential candidate so that they are ready for the
consequences of the result their vote will produce. We will not need a Chanda
Chimba III, but we will need legal requirement to compel presidential and
parliamentary candidates to appear on National Television Debate and answer
researched questions on why in life they took certain positions and actions and
if that will not complicate their decisions in public office.
NN
