A PRESIDENT MUST UNITE, NOT INSTRUCT COMMUNITIES TO FEAR EACH OTHER-Thompson  Luzendi

A PRESIDENT MUST UNITE, NOT INSTRUCT COMMUNITIES TO FEAR EACH OTHER.

By Thompson K Luzendi

The most dangerous weapon in politics is not the police, the courts, or political party cadres, it is fear. When a President uses fear to bind an entire tribe to himself, democracy suffers, national unity fractures, and the dignity of the Presidency is diminished. Recent remarks by President Hakainde Hichilema in Choma crossed that dangerous line.

By repeatedly suggesting that Tonga’s are targeted, and unsafe without his leadership, the President is not defending a community, he is weaponizing identity. He is cultivating a siege mentality that tells people: without me, you will be mistreated. That message is not protection; it is political blackmail. It locks a community into loyalty driven by fear rather than conviction, performance, or ideas.

This rhetoric helps explain why the President consistently secures overwhelming electoral margins in Southern Province. But electoral dominance built on fear is not democratic strength, it is ethnic emotional capture. It reduces citizens to a voting bloc whose primary political function is self-preservation, not national participation. That is profoundly harmful, both to the Tonga community being instrumentalized and to the country as a whole.

Zambia’s history is not one of tribal persecution. It is one of relative cohesion, forged deliberately by leaders who understood that national unity must be cultivated, not assumed. The Presidency, above all offices, carries a sacred responsibility to heal, unite, and rise above identity politics. When the Head of State instead promotes narratives of victimhood and imagined collective tribal targeting, he lowers the office to the level of political tribal mobilization.

Zambians do not hate the President or the tribe that he comes from. That narrative is false, lazy, and manipulative. The President received 2.8 million votes in 2021, one of the strongest national mandates in Zambia’s democratic history, cutting across regions, ethnicities, and classes. Those votes did not come from Southern Province alone. They came from all ten (10) provinces of the country.

What many Zambians including those from his tribe are angry about today is not who the President is, but what his government has failed to do. They are frustrated by high fuel prices, a high cost of living, shrinking civic space, and a constitutional amendment process perceived as rushed and self-serving. Disappointment with governance is not hatred; criticism is not tribalism.

When a President responds to legitimate public disappointment by retreating into ethnic self-pity, he avoids accountability. Worse, he teaches the nation that disagreement is dangerous and dissent is betrayal. This poisons democratic debate and deepens unnecessary divisions among ordinary people who, in their daily lives, live, work, marry, and struggle together without tribal hostility.

The Presidency must never be used to manufacture fear, cultivate grievance, or pit communities against an imagined enemy. Leadership demands courage, the courage to accept criticism, to admit failure, and to correct course. It does not demand emotional manipulation or tribal mobilization.

Zambia’s democracy cannot survive on fear-based loyalty. It must be built on performance, justice, accountability, and respect for all citizens equally. The President should lead as a national figure, not as the self-appointed shield of one community against the rest of the country.

The office of the presidency is too important to be reduced to a politics of division and self-pity. Zambia deserves better.