By Ephraim Shakafuswa
When Zimbabwe Became a Warning — And Why Zambia Must Remember
There was a time when conversations about Zimbabwe filled every Zambian bus station, barber shop, newsroom, market, and family gathering. We spoke about Zimbabwe with a strange mixture of shock, pity, caution, and sometimes even superiority. We watched teachers cross into Zambia carrying bags and certificates but no salaries.
We watched once-powerful professionals become traders in foreign lands. We listened to stories of inflation so severe that money lost value before sunset. We heard whispers about elections already decided before votes were cast. About opposition leaders arrested repeatedly. About fear becoming normal. And every time those stories reached us, we shook our heads and said: “Surely Zambia can never become like that.”
For many Zambians, Zimbabwe stopped being merely a neighboring country. It became a political warning sign. A lesson. A mirror we hoped would never reflect us. And at the centre of those conversations stood one name: Robert Mugabe. To many across the region, Mugabe became the symbol of what happens when liberation power slowly transforms into permanent power.
We criticised him relentlessly. We criticised the shrinking democratic space. We criticised the hostility toward dissent. We criticised the arrests of opposition leaders. We criticised the growing control of institutions. We criticised the culture where criticism increasingly looked dangerous. We criticised the belief that national stability depended on one political side remaining dominant forever.
In Zambia especially, Mugabe was often discussed not merely as a Zimbabwean problem, but as a continental warning. And yet today, many Zambians quietly find themselves asking uncomfortable questions. Not because Zambia has become Zimbabwe. But because certain familiar patterns now feel less distant than they once did. The atmosphere sounds familiar. A nation where citizens slowly become afraid to speak openly. Where criticism is interpreted as sabotage.
Where political opponents spend more time defending themselves in legal battles than engaging citizens politically. Where supporters begin justifying every excess because “our side” is in power. Where institutions increasingly appear selective depending on who stands accused. Where fear slowly replaces confidence in public life. None of these things happen overnight.
History teaches us that democratic decline rarely arrives dramatically. It arrives gradually. Quietly. Piece by piece. One justification at a time. At first, citizens defend it because the targets are unpopular. Then they tolerate it because they believe it is temporary. Eventually they normalise it because they no longer remember what political openness looked like before. That is how nations drift.
What makes this reflection painful is that many of us once spoke about Robert Mugabe with absolute moral certainty. We condemned everything we thought was wrong in Zimbabwe. We pointed fingers easily because we believed we ourselves would never tolerate similar tendencies at home. But perhaps the real question Zambia must ask itself today is this: Why did we criticise Robert Mugabe so passionately? Was it only because Zimbabwe’s economy collapsed? Or was it because deep down we understood something more dangerous — that when power begins fearing competition, democracy itself slowly becomes conditional? Maybe what disturbed us was not simply Robert Mugabe the individual.
Maybe it was the political culture that emerged around him. A culture where criticism became suspicious. Where opposition became treated as an inconvenience rather than a democratic necessity. Where loyalty to the ruling establishment increasingly determined who was heard, protected, or believed. And if those were truly the things we feared then, consistency demands that we remain alert whenever similar instincts begin emerging anywhere — including within ourselves.
History becomes dangerous when nations only recognise authoritarian tendencies after they are fully grown. The tragedy of many societies is not that warnings were absent. It is that people only acknowledged them when it was already too late. Zambia still has a choice. That is the important difference. Our institutions still stand. Our democracy still breathes.
Our citizens still speak. Our elections still matter. But democracies are not preserved by constitutions alone. They survive because citizens remain honest enough to recognise familiar warning signs — even when those signs emerge from leaders or movements they once trusted. Perhaps that is the lesson Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe was always trying to teach us.
ES 10062