Why I have changed my mind

Why I have changed my mind I am one of those Zambians who have to struggle to survive. Life is not easy. My salary does not cover all my expenses, and I have obligations to my immediate family as well as to my extended family. Until yesterday, I intended to vote for Brian…

Why I have changed my mind

I am one of those Zambians who have to struggle to survive. Life is not easy. My salary does not cover all my expenses, and I have obligations to my immediate family as well as to my extended family.

Until yesterday, I intended to vote for Brian Mundubile. I have now changed my mind, and I will confidently vote for President Hakainde Hichilema.

What changed my mind?

The whole saga surrounding Binwell Mpundu.

Binwell Mpundu, a major figure in the opposition, issued a video in which he appeared to say that he was prepared to die and to kill over these elections. Whatever political passion an election may inspire, the suggestion that one might be prepared to die or kill for it disturbed many of us profoundly.

I take pride in Zambia’s culture of tolerance, respect for the law and rejection of political violence. That statement therefore struck me as both alarming and deeply irresponsible. Some of us have travelled widely enough to know where this sort of language can lead. Escalation rarely announces itself with gunfire. It begins with words becoming harsher, opponents becoming enemies and violence gradually acquiring the vocabulary of legitimacy.

Then Brian Mundubile appeared publicly and said that the recording had been generated by artificial intelligence.

Some of us spent practically the whole day defending that explanation. If the man we were considering supporting for the presidency said that the recording was artificial intelligence, we were prepared to take him seriously. We dismissed those who insisted that the recording was genuine. We questioned their judgement. Some of us said rather more than we should have said in defence of President Mundubile’s position.

Then came another recording from Binwell Mpundu himself.

He said, in substance, that the original recording had not been generated by artificial intelligence. He blamed his media team for misleading the President and acknowledged that he had made the remarks. He then attempted to place them in context, explaining that when he spoke about killing he meant killing in self-defence.

But that is not how the original statement came across.

And this is where my problem becomes larger than Binwell Mpundu. My concern is now about judgement, organisation and leadership.

Why did Brian Mundubile not contact Binwell Mpundu directly before publicly declaring that the recording was artificial intelligence? The statement was politically explosive. It concerned violence during an election campaign. Surely such a matter demanded immediate verification at the highest level.

If necessary, call an emergency meeting. Telephone the man who supposedly made the statement. Establish what happened. Examine the recording. Speak to the communications team. Then address the nation.

Instead, supporters were sent into the public arena armed with an explanation that subsequently collapsed beneath them.

We had defended it all day, only to discover that the man at the centre of the controversy was himself saying that the recording was genuine.

Nobody enjoys being made to look foolish, particularly by people whose political judgement one has been defending.

For me, this episode reveals something more troubling than a communications mistake. It suggests an inability to coordinate a political message. Everyone appears to be singing from a different page. One person makes an inflammatory statement; another says it is artificial intelligence; the first then says it was not artificial intelligence but was misunderstood. What seems to be missing is a coherent centre capable of establishing facts before speaking.

That matters because governing Zambia is not a university seminar in which we are handed a hypothetical scenario and invited to imagine what we might do. Government is real. Decisions affect salaries, food prices, hospitals, schools, businesses, debt and the lives of millions of people.

I had already begun to wonder whether Brian Mundubile was adequately prepared for the presidency. His BBC interview disappointed me because I struggled to identify a clear governing vision. I nevertheless gave him the benefit of the doubt. Interviews can go badly. Politicians grow into larger roles. A candidate deserves some room to develop.

This latest episode has made that generosity much harder to sustain.

My original willingness to vote for the opposition was not emotional. I recognise the enormous difficulties that the present Government inherited when it came to power in 2021: the debt burden, the economic damage associated with the pandemic, corruption, inadequate transparency and the widespread feeling that public resources had become available for those sufficiently close to power.

Money was being passed around with astonishing ease. Those of us who had studied economics knew perfectly well that much of it was borrowed money, that substantial interest was accumulating and that, sooner or later, the bill would arrive.

It did.

I was nevertheless prepared to believe that the opposition had learnt from the failures of the PF. I also hoped that it had studied the shortcomings of the present Government, particularly its difficulty in translating lower inflation and greater macroeconomic stability into stronger household incomes and better wages for ordinary people.

My concern remains essentially economic. I am not especially attracted to bombast, emotionalism or theatrical politics. I look at the facts on the ground.

And the facts now leave me with a simple choice.

Imagine Zambia as a large truck travelling along a difficult road. The present driver may have accelerated where he should have slowed down. He may have taken a detour that was unnecessary. He may sometimes have changed gear badly. We are entitled to criticise him for every one of those mistakes.

But he appears to know the road, the machinery and the destination.

The alternative cannot simply be someone standing beside the truck insisting that he is a good man and therefore deserves the keys. Before I hand him the steering wheel, I want to know whether he understands the brakes, the gears, the weight of the vehicle and the road ahead.

The Presidency is not a driving lesson.

At this particular moment, I would rather remain with a driver whose mistakes I can identify than hand the truck to someone who has yet to convince me that he knows how to drive it.

Antonia Mwanza Mulenga PhD