Alexander Chikwanda

HARD FACT:

DID you know that the late veteran politician and former finance minister, Alexander Chikwanda, had very rare courage? In 1980, he resigned as Minister of Agriculture after telling off President Kenneth Kaunda [during a Cabinet Meeting] for running Zambia like his personal company.

President Kaunda was so furious that he walked out of the meeting.

For details, follow the excerpt below from

(Conversations with Memorable Personalities)

Amos Malupenga:

So where did you work after returning from Sweden?

Alexander Chikwanda:

When I came back in July 1968, I joined Indeco as a project analyst.

Amos Malupenga:

When and how did you get into government service?

Alexander Chikwanda:

I didn’t stay long in Indeco. In fact, at the end of 1968, President Kaunda introduced a post of district governor and I was named district governor for Zambezi, the Baluvale. It was quite an exciting thing to go to a remote place like that after having been in Europe for four years.

But I didn’t stay there long because in October 1969, KK dissolved the then central committee of UNIP. There were some political difficulties and conflicts and in its place he put an interim committee of 11 people and I was one of those 11 people. I was also given the function of secretary for administration.

So I ran the show at Freedom House from end of 1969 to sometime in 1970 when I was appointed deputy minister in the Office of the President, the post I held up to the end of 1971.Then I was named deputy minister for development and planning. I was in charge of development planning function.

In February 1972, I got promoted to my first cabinet post as minister responsible for health. I stayed in that post from February 1972 to December 1973 when KK appointed me Minister of Finance and Planning.
At the end of 1975, KK decided that it was time to move and I moved on to the Ministry of Local Government and Housing up to April 1977. Then he re-assigned me to the Ministry of Lands and Agriculture which was later realigned to be the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Development. I served in this
post up to 30th June 1980 when I resigned.

My resignation had been precipitated by disagreements over governance. During one of the Cabinet meetings in February 1980, some of my colleagues like the late Joshua Lumina and I said a few hard things which KK did not take kindly to. We said, among other things, that regrettably the Republic of Zambia had been transformed into a Zambia Limited in which KK and a few cronies owned the bulk of equity and everybody was reduced to a miserable disinterested spectator.

So KK didn’t take it kindly and he walked out of the meeting and I went to my office and wrote a resignation which he didn’t accept.

And after a few days we managed to reach some mutual agreement that I would smoothly bow out at the end of June so it looked smooth.

And my colleagues were very surprised that KK decided to give me a farewell lunch he gave only to a minister. Normally, he fired the ministers and that was it. But I resigned and he gave me a farewell lunch on July 17th 1980 and even gave me the honour to invite people I wanted to come to lunch.

Some of my colleagues said ‘no, you and KK must be playing games. He walks out of the meeting and there he is giving you lunch’.

I said ‘you know what you don’t realise is that people are friends with their equals. That’s why he gave me lunch because I am his equal though I acknowledge that he is a senior colleague and I respect him very much but you people are sycophants. You play the role of slaves so he can’t give you lunch because he is not your equal. Nobody plays with his slaves or his sycophants’. …

An excerpt from

(Conversations with Memorable Personalities)

Picture below:

Alexander Chikwanda (with wife Margaret) as finance minister in the early 1970s, arriving at the National Assembly to present the national budget.

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