Edgar Lungu on tribalism-Laura Miti

Edgar Lungu on tribalism

By Laura Miti

President Lungu has a solid reputation for making unthought- through, bafflingly self-harming statements when speaking off-the-cuff.

Consensus has been that he must keep to prepared scripts. Well, it looks like even that is not working anymore. Someone in his team, it seems, has decided to make him sound as off-into-thorny-bushes, while scripted, as he does unscripted.

Goodness, his last written statement on tribalism against the Tonga was – are sure??

You see, Mr Lungu has the dishonour of running the most deliberately and actively tribally hateful presidency in Zambia’s history. All his peers were variously on the continuum of favouring their tribes mates with positions in government and other favours that power can bestow. Nothing more.

Come one Edgar Lungu and that was not enough. He set up a both overt and covert hate machine against the tribe his bitterest rival happened to come from – the Tonga. So, for him, it was not enough to give friends, relatives and tribes mates cushy jobs – no!

He wanted the country to despise the Tonga. He hoped, I guess, that in causing citizens to believe that the Tonga were different on the negative scale, that they were to be sidelined, to be detested, Zambia would never vote for the man he feared most, politically.

President Lungu himself was responsible for the covert part of his hate campaign. He kept his statements to the subliminal messaging he tries in his last statement like – my rival is using tribe to win elections. He also set up that maliciously intended Voting Patterns Inquiry, whose report he was never able to publish because it condemned his government.

The full injecting of venom into the national psyche against the Tonga, and to a considerable extent their tribal cousins, he left to his proxies, the most vicious of whom was Chishimba Kambwili.

Goodness – how Kambwili, Luo, Chanda Nyela, Bizwell Mutale etal worked hard to convince the nation that Tonga people were inherently, dangerously self-loving. That, if one of their kind ever came to office, the rest of the country would have to beg them to barely breathe.

Chairperson of the hate brigade was unquestionably Mr Chishimba Kambwili. I cannot, therefore, explain my sense of disgust when I read President Lungu’s attempt to suggest that the former Minister of Information, who used even his public office to spread hate, was wrongly prosecuted and convicted for hate speech.

Ha ba Lungu! I thought this was a topic you would avoid. Just act like you didn’t know Mr Kambwili paid the price for doing your dirty business.

But no – you dare speak about it!
Even now, when the ordinary Tonga citizen has proved to be the most unconcerned about having “their man” in State House, you continue spewing sweetened venom against them.

Look, President Lungu, I don’t know if you are actually a hateful man or this is all about politics. All I will say is there is so much to talk about your successor without touching tribe. I can give you some ideas:

1. We desperately need to amend the constitution to solidify our democracy.
2. The number of promises made during the campaign that he now knows (or maybe knew) are impossible to fulfil.
3. A Cabinet that is begging for a reshuffle.
4. A police service that is absolutely rogue.
5. If you want, you can even add problems you created yourself like the economy.

Why or why, must you continue to attempt to poison a nation that, before you, had never distinguished one part of its people, for collective hate?