Zambia keeps changing drivers and never fixes the car

In April 2017, police broke into the Lusaka home of the country’s main opposition leader in the dead of night, fired tear gas and carried him away on a charge of treason. His offence was that his motorcade had failed to give way to the presidential convoy on a road in Western Province. Hakainde Hichilema spent more than four months in custody before the State quietly dropped the case.

Nine years later, that same man is President, freshly returned for a second term. And the runner-up in the election he has just won, Brian Mundubile, sits in custody on a treason charge, with a sedition charge added for good measure. The State says it is still gathering evidence.

If there is a single image that captures what has gone wrong in Zambian politics, it is this one. The faces change. The furniture stays exactly where it was.

Antonio Mwanza, the Democratic Progressive Party leader who sat out the polls, put it bluntly in a long radio interview this week. There are no good men when it comes to power, he said, only good institutions or bad ones. It is the most useful sentence any Zambian politician has spoken since the results were declared, and it should be read as an indictment of every party that has ever held State House, including the one Mr Mwanza once served.

Consider the record. Kenneth Kaunda built the University of Zambia and the University Teaching Hospital, and then built a one-party state to protect himself. Frederick Chiluba rode to power on the promise of multiparty freedom and then tried to buy himself a third term, until churches, lawyers and students stopped him in 2001. The Patriotic Front turned the Public Order Act into a padlock on opposition rallies. The UPND spent a decade on the receiving end of that padlock and promised, loudly, never to use it.

Now look at what has happened since polling day.

On polling night, the Electoral Commission of Zambia suspended counting and the announcement of results on security grounds. Counting later resumed, and a clear winner was declared. Nobody seriously disputes that President Hichilema won. Church monitors said so. Mr Mwanza says so. This column says so.

But nobody has explained what happened in the hours when the count stood still. Nobody has told the voters of Mandevu, who did not vote at all because ballot papers were stolen, whether a single thief has been caught. And on 24 August, the last day on which any losing candidate could file a petition challenging the result, the courts of the Republic were shut on “security reasons” that have never been set out in public.

The Law Association of Zambia said it best: the right of access to the courts is meaningless if the courts can simply be closed at the precise moment citizens most need them. That is not a partisan complaint. It is a description of a door slammed in the face of the law itself.

Then came the arrests. Opposition leaders, former Members of Parliament and campaign figures have been picked up, some in circumstances their lawyers and families only learned of later. Where the law requires an appearance before a court within 48 hours, detainees have waited. Where public figures with fixed addresses could have been served a simple call-out, the police have preferred the drama of a night arrest.

The Government says it had been investigating some of the accused for three years. Yet the prosecutions chief has been quoted as saying the State is still collecting evidence. Both statements cannot comfortably be true. If the evidence exists, put it before a judge. If it does not, open the cell door. There is no third option in a constitutional democracy.

And now, as if on cue, comes the oldest song in the Zambian hymn book. A ruling party Member of Parliament has floated the removal of presidential term limits. Cadres have taken up the chorus. The line, as always, is that it is not the President asking. It is “the people”. When that fails to persuade, the line becomes “let Parliament decide”, which is another way of saying “let us decide, because we have the numbers”.

Zambians have been here before. They were asked about term limits by the Mung’omba Constitution Review Commission and said two terms. They said it again in 2001, in the streets, in green ribbons. They have said it at every review since. A people who have answered the same question the same way for a quarter of a century are not confused. They are being ignored.

To his credit, President Hichilema has said on more than one platform that nobody deserves a third term. He should say it again, now, from the podium, in words that leave no room for interpretation. Silence from the Head of State is not neutrality. In this country, silence has always been read as permission.

What makes all of this so dispiriting is not that the UPND has turned out to be wicked. It is that it has turned out to be ordinary. It has inherited a presidency with the power to appoint judges, electoral commissioners, ambassadors, police chiefs and almost every head of a public institution, and, like every party before it, it has found that power far too comfortable to surrender.

The ECZ is appointed by the President, who is also a candidate. The prosecutions office answers to a system the President heads. The public broadcaster, funded by every taxpayer, tilts towards whoever holds State House, as it has done since independence. The courts can be closed with a notice and a phrase. None of these arrangements was invented by the current Government. All of them have been used by it.

That is the real crisis. Zambia keeps changing the driver and leaving the car exactly as it is: faulty brakes, a steering wheel that pulls to one side and a speedometer the driver is allowed to reset. Each new driver swears he will fix it. Each one discovers that the faulty car suits him perfectly well while he is the one behind the wheel.

The cadres understand this better than anyone. Mr Mwanza tells of friends who walked Lusaka’s streets with him five years ago and are now building blocks of flats in Silverest and posing with pigs and fish ponds. We have seen this before too. The MMD had its instant businessmen. The PF had its instant businessmen. Where are they now? Their fortunes lasted exactly as long as their party did.

There is a lesson in that for the UPND, and it is not a moral lesson. It is a practical one. Every law passed for comfort in power becomes a weapon in the hands of the next Government. The treason charge that held Mr Hichilema in 2017 is the same instrument now holding Mr Mundubile. The cyber laws the UPND once denounced are now turned on its own detractors. A Constitution amended to suit one President will one day serve a President the UPND fears.

So what should be done?

First, take the appointment of electoral commissioners away from the President and give it to an independent panel, with confirmation by Parliament. Second, bind every presidential candidate, the incumbent included, to the same campaign timetable and the same rules on public media. Third, give the judiciary financial independence so that no administrator can lock its doors on a deadline day. Fourth, require the prosecution to have a case before it takes a liberty. And fifth, leave Article 106 exactly where it is.

None of this requires the UPND to lose power. It only requires the party to govern as though it one day will.

President Hichilema has five years left. He knows, better than any President before him, what it feels like to sit in a cell on a charge the State cannot prove. He can be the leader who finally fixes the car. Or he can be the next name on a long list of men who were certain the rules would always favour them.

Zambia has already seen how that list ends.

By Kingsley Mwila

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