KK DESERVED NOBEL PEACE PRIZE, BUT HIS CONTRIBUTIONS TO LIBERATION STRUGGLE HAVE BEEN UNDER ESTIMATED – UNIP
UNIP says it is not too late for Zambia to market afresh the country’s founding President, Kenneth Kaunda, for him to be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.
In a special interview on Prime Television on Sunday night, UNIP president Trevor Mwamba said Dr Kaunda’s contributions to the liberation struggle of most countries in southern Africa have been under-estimated.
He said while pressing colonialists for freedom in southern African countries, Dr Kaunda was emphatic on doing so peacefully.
The special interview came on the back of Dr Kaunda, who died in June 2021, having a posthumous 100th birthday on Sunday.
The programme’s interviewer, Frank Mutubila, wondered why Dr Kaunda was never awarded the Nobel Peace Prize and whether South Africa marketed Nelson Mandela more than Zambia did for its first head of State.
Mandela, the first democratically elected President of South Africa, shared the Nobel Peace Prize with that country’s last White President, Frederik W. de Klerk, in 1993 for negotiating the end of the apartheid state and collaborating in the quest for a non-racial democracy.
Other recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize on the continent include late ANC president Chief Albert Luthuli, late Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat, late Anglican cleric Desmond Tutu, late UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, former director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed el Baradei, Former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Congolese doctor Denis Mukwege and Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed.
CREDIT: Zambia Daily Mail