Why are we so good at choosing bad leaders?- Sishuwa Sishuwa

Why are we so good at choosing bad leaders?

By Sishuwa Sishuwa

Why is the Zambian society, as constituted today, so docile and so unquestioning? How is it possible that we – the citizens and our national leaders – are hardly troubled by the degree of our subhuman existence? Why are we Zambians so good at choosing bad leaders? Come to think of it, the answer may actually lie right there, in my last question: we are so good at choosing bad leaders perhaps because we are a bad people! Here, for example, is how bad a people we are, literally:

• We are now ranked number 154 on the world Human Development Index (HDI) of 193 countries (remember the HDI measures longevity and healthy life, access to knowledge and decent standard of living);
• Less than three per cent of Zambia’s population is expected to grow older than 65 years with the rest of us condemned to very short miserable lives at a time in human history when some countries have a problem of too many old people;

• Of our national population that is able and willing to work, 62 years into our “independence”, 86 per cent still rely on some agricultural activity to survive, only 6 per cent have an industrial job, and a mere 9 per cent are employed in services;
• We have a high unemployment rate of about 60%, one that is especially acute among the youth, and somehow pray and hope that a miracle will cure our social ills;

• ⁠At least 60% of our population is poor and almost half of our country’s children are stunted. In absolute terms, at least 48 percent of Zambians are living in extreme poverty, which contributes to increasing cases of depression, violence, divorce, and suicide;
• ⁠We are among the top ten hungriest nations, globally, notwithstanding our natural wealth, illustrated by the fact that we are among the top 10 copper producing countries in the entire world;

• ⁠Our national economy is dominated by the service sector, which accounts for almost 60% of GDP, and yet this sector employs only 9% of our labour force;
• ⁠In terms of household income or consumption by percentage share, the top 10% gobble up a whooping 47.4% while the bottom 10% survives on a tiny 1.5%;

• ⁠To sustain itself, the government spends more borrowed money than it can collect from the people of Zambia through countless and high taxes. We are, therefore, chronically indebted. We are an appendage of our creditors as a country; we are not sovereign;
• ⁠Corruption permeates all levels of our society and has become so entrenched that to be incorruptible is to risk alienating oneself from the majority. Government contracts are inflated, officials steal from the treasury with reckless abandon, nchekeleko (what is in it for me?) is now a cultural trait, and an incumbent President finds no shame in refusing to publish their asset declarations because being transparent would expose the extent to which government policies are designed to benefit companies in which he has an interest!;

• ⁠Many of our key formal institutions such as the judiciary, the police, and Electoral Commission no longer enjoy public confidence. In the case of the judiciary, for instance, the opposition have lost confidence in the courts to such an extent that they are now reluctant to take any political cases to court because they know that the judges either take forever to dispose of cases that should take little time or pander to the interests of the actors in the executive. There is also a general lack of respect for the rule of law by those in power, intolerance of opposition and critical opinion, intimidation, harassment, and arrest of opposition and civic figures on trumped up charges, and tolerance for and active promotion of impunity by ruling party supporters get away with misconduct that results in the arrest and prosecution of oppositionists;
• ⁠Elections (an orderly and effective mechanism of maintaining or changing governments) and the Constitution (important in ensuring that everyone plays by the rules of the game) are increasingly under threat and this is worrying because these are the institutions that should be consolidating our democracy over time;

• We are a deeply polarised nation and the actions of those in power have only fueled this split, which has mainly taken ethnic and political expression. Our leaders continue to bury their heads in the sand when our national unity is at stake and appear to be impervious to the anger that is brewing;
• Our national leaders, from politicians in government to those in opposition, hardly put forward coherent, concrete, and realistic plans grounded in realistic terms of what is to be done to relieve our deplorable situation including building local structures to realise any plans. For example, it is well enough to talk about supporting small-scale farmers, but is a ground-up structure being created and supported to allow this? The cooperative movement before at least managed this – they supported the creation of local structures that fed into the wider movement;

• We talk over each other and not to each other. This has become a characteristic feature of Zambia’s oppositional politics. There are certain sectors where it is in the best interest for everyone to pull together, particularly when it comes to guaranteeing the fundamental interests and security of citizens. For example, it is much better to have a unified voice against the exploitation of Zambian workers or the dispossession of rural residents of their land and livelihoods; the prevention of instability in the country by avoiding business deals and political arrangements that would plunge the country into conflict (i.e., uranium mining, nuclear energy, asylum for warmongers etc.) or more debt;

• Our value system has virtually collapsed. Much of this breakdown in moral order can be traced back to the 1990s when Frederick Chiluba and his friends in the Movement for Multiparty Democracy sought to take advantage of the deregulated financial and legal framework for their own corrupt and criminal aims. Between 1991 and 2001, corruption thrived, values were placed on the market and personal acquisition of material wealth became entrenched as an important social value and the accepted standard in terms of which a person was judged by society as a success, regardless of how that wealth was acquired. For the poor, in a setting where the powerful and wealthy are morally bankrupt, they begin to create their own moral frameworks to justify survivalist strategies, leading to the normalisation of subversion of rules and social order – in effect creating a moral crisis;

• At a time when others elsewhere are talking about a ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’, are we regressing into some of the most backward, primitive and irrational modes of thought, beliefs and practices, thanks largely to a retarded Christian theology colonialism bequeathed to us. This may be unpopular, but the time must come soon when we must ask difficult questions about the impact of Christianity on the native mind in us, and how to grow beyond this. Christian fanaticism is more of a psychological issue in that the protracted, unrelieved experience of suffering leads many people to doubt their capacity to change the situation, and instead turn to magical thinking. In the short term, this provides a convenient explanation (albeit fantastical) for the crisis. In the long term, however, it sets the situation for further social instability as it is exploited by religious charlatans who take the poor’s money for their lavish lifestyles on the false assurance that ‘God will reward you’, and by politicians who, Bible in hand, pander to the interests of the faithful while looting the national treasury;
• We have a disturbingly high number of people who do not have access to the basics of decent shelter, nutrition, health, and education. All this means we have a large share of our population vegetating or permanently hovering over the pit of death. Land, where people could provide even a subsistence for food, has been commoditised (the existing National Lands Policy destroys any bit left of a commons). The provision of these services is now increasingly being privatised, with the state’s role being reduced to that of facilitating the pillaging or theft of our natural wealth by Western, Chinese, South African, and Middle Eastern multinationals and privatising national assets with little public consultation;

• We have normalised abnormality and lawlessness. We have reached a point where to have no electricity, no running water and basic sanitation, to go to a public hospital and find no medicine, to have dirt in public spaces and dysfunctional municipalities, to waste taxpayers’ money on useless undertakings, to fail to pay retirees on time, to be paid salaries months after payday, to witness ruling party members conniving with state actors to loot public funds through consent orders, to have citizens blocked from and arrested by the police for exercising constitutionally-guaranteed human rights (e.g. association, speech, assembly), to defend the indefensible, and to say nothing when the government violates the law because ‘boma ni boma’ has become normal. No new forms of consciousness can rise out of these conditions.

When one takes all these variables and more together, it is easy to see that they all make for a very bad people that can only select and be led by equally bad leaders, in order to sustain their backwardness and poverty! Any people, you see, gets a leadership best suited for them. In short, we indeed are a very bad people! We can change this, if we commit to becoming, and actually become, good people. Then, and only then, we can allow only good leaders to lead us!

So, what can we do, as citizens, to reject the mediocrity of our lives and leadership, to change our national plight before we sink further into the abyss? How can we move from simply knowing how bad things are to taking action? Why does Zambia’s “educated class”, knowing so well the weaknesses and backwardness of the Kenneth Kaundas, Frederick Chilubas, Rupiah Bandas, Michael Satas, Edgar Lungus, and Hakainde Hichilemas, and fully aware of the sorry state of the mass of our people still do virtually nothing about both the conditions of our life and leadership? Are we such a pathological parasitic educated middle class that we are completely paralysed and are incapable of the necessary and essential political activity required to overturn our national plight?

Are we an impotent social class incapable of fulfilling its historic and social responsibility, always blaming others for our sorry state of affairs in the country? (…Bad politicians, illiterate population, backward rural dwellers, etc. – running away from the answer to our problems which is all the time staring us straight in the face, using our very own eyes: us!) Have we, as a people, become so debased and dehumanised that we have effectively ceased to hold ourselves in high regard, began the downward spiral of lower and lower expectations for ourselves and our kith and kin, and effectively commuted our very existence to spirits, viewing the battles or challenges that confront us as not physical?

As major global powers intensify their efforts to pillage and grab what is left of our mineral wealth, how best can we, as a country, prepare ourselves and respond in an effective way to avoid falling for this new Scramble of Africa a second time, especially that deals for resources were the precursor to political control previously? What has really created what appears to be a readymade set of corruptible leaders, who pawn off the country for a few trinkets, who accumulate through brazen theft of public resources and massive sale of Zambian asserts to so-called investors, and who strut around with self-importance when they are nothing but disposable playthings of even bigger global kleptocrats?

Why are our leaders in government betraying us and future generations to extremely shoddy deals with mining corporations, to unsustainable public debt and foreign commercial interests with reckless abandon as if there would be no tomorrow? Why are they allowing to develop a situation where every prominent piece of the country will be owned by foreign powers, multinational corporations, or other foreign actors, wherever they may be coming from? How much ‘Zambia’ is left?

What quality of citizens are we who tolerate a Chiluba, a Banda, a Sata, a Lungu, a Hichilema, for a national leader, who accept to be reduced to the subhuman status our current situation confines most of us to? What are the leadership qualities that are needed for the resolution of our complex national challenges today? How do we breed the sort of journalism that prods a politician’s deeper thoughts and fears, that identifies the key issues of the day and how to deal with or address them? How do we raise public universities that serve as key sites of the sources of knowledge production that is vital to the formulation of policies that inform formal decision-making and secure national interests?

In my view, resolving the challenges identified above and others requires a competent, qualified, and effective national leadership that acknowledges the existence of a crisis in our country, that understands its roots, form, content, and nature, and that seeks to take corrective measures, including uniting and coalescing our energies towards a shared or common goal. Such a leadership should also possess most of humanity’s ethical values – courage, compassion and love for one’s fellow human beings, moral force of character, integrity, genuine humility, honesty, a predilection for consultation, consensus-building, communication, co-operation, active listening, and the selfless pursuit of the public good, and not the selfish striving for personal gain. It is hardly possible to look at, say, Cabinet today without being struck by the calamity of the absence of this kind of leadership.

As a people, we once tasted this type of leadership under the presidencies of Kaunda and Mwanawasa, when the currency was values, not wealth or accumulation. In fact, I have been reading some of Kaunda’s works such as Letters to my Children and his thoughts on humanism. I do think that his principles of humanism are relevant in the present context, perhaps more than ever before. I would say that one of his major achievements was building an ideology for nationhood that was underpinned by respect for one another’s humanity, humanism. I think we should reflect on this, and seek to reinforce it, as what I increasingly see is the disheartening erosion of this very principle.

The solution to our national crisis also requires a clear understanding of its roots and evolution. I must clarify that the national crisis whose features I have outlined above did not start with the United Party for No Democracy/Development (UPND) or President Hichilema – though its degree in certain areas has increased considerably under them. The country has been in a protracted crisis since the early 1980s, but one that grew in particular intensity from the 1990s when Chiluba and his government set about dismantling the forms of social protection that mitigated its worst effects – hunger, illiteracy, destitution and ill-health.

In short, the failure of our economic and social system to sustain over a prolonged period the lives of the majority of Zambians and the deterioration of state institutions have been an incremental process, stretching over a long historical period. The current trajectory, however, is worrying because we are not seeing a rebalancing towards ‘normality’. In addition to the increasing intensity of our national crisis, the balance of forces is pushing us towards this becoming more severe.

In other words, the solution to any crisis is to be found in the very economic system that is failing the people and this requires us to carefully identify the actual causes of our crisis, not the symptoms. A fundamental weakness of the discourse on ‘crisis’ is the problem of confusing causes and symptoms, and how these feed into each other. The middle class and so-called ‘experts’ of all hues tend to overemphasise the social manifestations of crisis, its expression in social and political instability, at the expense of unscrambling the real foundations of any crisis – the mode of production of the material means of life and the system of ownership – which then are reflected in the social and political life of the community or people.

As a result, leaving the mode of production of the material means of life and the system of ownership intact but tinkering with the social and political arrangements does not resolve the crisis. This has been our experience of ‘independence’ in Zambia. After some time, the accumulated unmet social and political needs from an untransformed economy catch up, inevitably throwing the entire system into a cycle of instability, disorder, and so on. It should not be this way. Changing the status quo requires asking ourselves a set of hard questions.

What do we need to do to reverse our gradual decline, rediscover our purpose, vision and moral voice, and begin to work like a functioning state that plans? Who will lead this effort and how? Most importantly, what is our national plan, our long term-vision? Who is responsible for strategic planning in our country? How do we craft a unifying strategy and vision, given the divisive nature of our politics, for nation building? How do we effect strategies for broad based societal change?

Lessons from history suggest that most societies transform when there is a sense of crisis, or a re-analysis of self after one. If this holds, how do we identity the narratives of the country crisis that are particular to us and tap into the spirit of the times and offer possibilities of what could be, and not only what is? I may be wrong, but I think the option to carve a national agenda is open to whoever is willing to attempt to create the larger narratives of nationhood. So, the media (newspapers, radio, television stations), our educational systems (classrooms from primary to secondary school and to universities), church, popular forms of entertainment (music, theatre etc) are all available mediums that can bring various fora (be it chiefs, children, artists etc) together to participate in writing a new script for the country.

I think that very much like the architects of the neoliberal agenda, such a scripting would need to be well thought out – providing a humane and flexible enough template that can create a reasonably replicable agenda. It would have to be something that resonates on a very phenomenological level with the masses of the Zambian population, regardless of their educational background. It would need to be hopeful, but also tempered by a hard realism of all needing to pull our socks together.

We have a long way to go to our national plight get to a better future, but we must go there! In my view, the first step towards that desired future is to demand better from our elected public leaders. Unfortunately, many of us mistake criticism of the actions or policies of our elected public leaders for dislike or hate of the incumbent president at any given time, support for the opposition, or some other adhominem attack. I bear special understanding and sympathies for those among us who exhibit these unfortunate tendencies.

There must be many and complex and interrelated social, economic, political, cultural, religious, and spiritual forces combining with our entire history as a people that have moulded and continue to shape the current psychology and character structure of the ‘typical Zambian’, one who generally reveres authority and is unquestioning! Our challenge is to unravel these forces, understand them, and reshape them to build a different and genuinely alive Zambian. We must understand all this as they relate to our place in the whole world.

It is not, in a sense, a Hichilema, Lungu, Sata, Banda, Mwanawasa, Chiluba or Kaunda problem: these leaders have definitely played a part in generating the psychological and material conditions which have created us as a cowardly, zombie-like, easy to manipulate, naive, and quite superstitious people. None of these and more negative qualities are biological, however. They have their roots in our complex history with all the social forces that have shaped this history, including a dominant fawning, ingratiating, degraded Christian theology and practice (largely pacifist) to which we so often appeal to resolve our perfectly manmade problems. Our political and religious leaders simply feast on this historical banquet!

This social milieu or context explains why I often insist on structural change as the route to a truly radical transformation of Zambia, not merely replacing one set of individuals with another. We must desist from thinking that merely changing “presidents” and “parties” will lead to any meaningful changes in our cultures, lives, and country. I am extremely optimistic, however, that there is potential for a new national consciousness to emerge in Zambia. In fact, our current deep seated systemic and structural social, economic and cultural crises are a perfect foundation to begin to build a new consciousness, to begin to resurrect the human being in the Zambian.

The first port of call is us, first as individual Zambians, I must maintain. As an individual, one must refuse to be reduced to the subhuman status our current situation confines all of us to. We must peacefully rebel against this status. Then, in our many millions of personal life activities, we must transmit this rebellion to others. So far, the main platform for criticism of our lives is in the media, and largely confined to the deplorable social and economic conditions we now suffer. It need not be confined to this terrain.

Ethically, morally, spiritually, intellectually, culturally, and yes, ultimately, philosophically, we must also wage a war against influences in these spheres which define and confine us to subhuman existence. To be who we are is a reflection of inferior qualities in us of all the human essences I have listed. We must question everything and everyone, fearlessly, especially if they are leading us or making claims to want to lead us.

What is perhaps more frustrating than our subhuman existence is the apathy of many people, especially the middle class, towards public interest causes. This collective indifference has left the poor defenseless and exposed all of us to all forms of abuse by those entrusted with public office. This is regrettable. What made the generations before mine great was their refusal to accept as given certain inimical conditions, their willingness to take risks, to work and sacrifice. Their sense of community. Their ability to care of others and in many cases to help provide for them.

Today, I fear that we are increasingly becoming a country of passive, self-centered citizens uninterested in serious conversations about the state of the country and who retain a disturbing laissez faire attitude to life where when things get bad, people just party more or pray more, or both. I fear that year in and year out, we are unfortunately unlearning all the useful things that made us value what ground us, like land, the importance of kingship and heritage, and the value of history.

Turning the tide of this trend and taking back and reshaping our asserts in our own ways would be a tough process, which would require a mobilisation of energies probably not seen since the independence struggle, an ideological mind shift, a strong and enlightened leadership, and significant consensus (people would need to be willing to endure a temporary period of upheaval).
A strong and enlightened leadership would however have to come from below. This means we need to become a good people first before the simultaneous process of producing good leaders can begin. This is where the challenge is. There will be no messianic essence or phenomenon in our country to liberate us. It is not our leaders, it is us. This is it, nothing else. We are our own leaders, we are us, we lead ourselves, put in reverse.

It is the development of complex internal contradictions, frictions, emanations, revelations in real life among us which make us, which props up the kind of leadership our levels of development require. Once we internalise this dialectic, in theory, we are home and dry. The next step is to turn theory into practice. When this is done, we are halfway there, to becoming fully human. The rest is simply a complex interlocking set-in motion of people, process and technologies and cultures that ultimately lead to genuine development and freedom.
Any expectation of some singular external emergence of some leader to lead us anywhere simply makes us all pawns in the fulfilment of the desires of such a one. And this has been our historical experience. It is not the essence of freedom. It is servitude to the whims of an individual. This is not to deny the role of the individual in history as actor, subject-object, author/creator and leader. Rather, it is to simply acknowledge the most obvious fact to me: that it is society, the forest, which produces the leader, the most beautiful tree, and not the other way round. No single tree can make a forest. Trees, on the other hand, are found in forests!

So, to rephrase the question, when shall we, as a people, be good at rejecting bad leaders? In theory, the answer is very simple: When we become good. In practice, this means rejecting what we have become and evolving and beginning a new praxis – living our belief that we are human, in everything we do, and rejecting all that dehumanises us. This involves a fight, sacrifices, pain, defeats and starting all over again until we get it right. Our cheap commodification can be defeated by our liberating activity.

In other words, becoming a good people implies a profound respect for the painstaking work of attacking and destroying the intolerable poverty (all round poverty –spiritual, philosophical, material, economic, political, and cultural) in our country and creating a new and on a higher plane character structure of the various classes that make up Zambian society, before we can see any real changes in our society.

Any serious historian would teach us that when we go back to the various epochs and stages of development of human societies, we will not fail to recognise that distinct material and economic circumstances were entered upon only after specific mass psychologies and unique character changes had been engendered by the complex interactions of the objective and material forces of those societies. New religions, new political ideas, new mass cultures, new psychologies were all a complex outcome of real movements in the socio-economic material conditions of a people as part of a shared effort towards the greater fulfilment of the human person.

We too can do it because this is the ontological vocation of the human person – to always grow to higher status, all round, and to strive to defeat all things which retard our full expression and full lives. Our basic problem is that we are slow, way too slow, in moving in the right direction. Let there be no doubt however that we will get there, as some Nigerian song I once listened to partly says. We may not even know now fully well how we will get there, but we must know and have confidence we will! Metaphysically, the ontological vacation of the human person is to seek AND FIND greater freedoms, not less, and we Zambians are no exception to this rule.

All we need is to rediscover our full humanity, to revisit our lives, our statehood, our nationhood, our very existence and its purpose; to reconnect to the land, our waters and mountains and forests and animals, and to ourselves; to reclaim our basic sense of humanity, to rediscover the power of political organisation around our struggles to reclaim our humanity, our part of the Earth.

The journey towards becoming a good people can start today and start with anyone in whose head and soul the pain of our pitiful state has stricken a chord. It can be accelerated by working towards changing the mindset of many of our so called “middle class” Zambians – a parasitic, fearful, decayed, and aged-before-its-time layer of people. We must engage them. We must challenge them, never lose an opportunity to let them know that we have a different take on life to theirs.

We have the responsibility to become more human, to pay the price for our complete liberation, to lead full and meaningful lives. Today, many of us are not living meaningfully. We are just there, occupying spaces, breathing free air, fitting in routine roles: waking up, eating, going to the toilet, going to work, fighting for hierarchy or power, having sex, drinking beer, producing children, and refusing to entertain the belief that a better Zambia is possible.

We have become way too comfortable with the purposeless lives we lead. In one sense, we are the living dead. In the entire nation, very few contribute or create anything meaningful that will outlast us. We have not developed as a country because the heavy lifting is left to a few. There ought to be more to life, but we have settled for being all round irrelevant, waiting to die. That is a very sad way to live, to die.

A hundred years from now, what evidence would exist that we once lived, outside our families? We have the opportunity to create that evidence today. At a political level, a good starting point is voting for competent men and women who are patriots, have a feasible plan, and are committed to restoring the nation’s dignity, where they come from notwithstanding.

Source: https://x.com/ssishuwa/status/2046246404457165180?s=20