LET ME EXPLAIN THE WORD “MUST” IN MY EARLIER ARTICLE “HH MUST MEET LUMUMBA”.
By Kellys Kaunda
Most of you who commented on this post in the past two days were preoccupied with the word “must”.
In your view, I was commanding a whole President to meet a ‘nobody’.
For you, the President doesn’t NEED anything from a ‘mere’ academician. It’s the other way around, you seem to reason.
But I understand where most of you are coming from while some of you innocently missed the role the word “must” was playing in my article.
The word can be highly nuanced as it serves different purposes in different contexts.
For me, let me illustrate what the word “must” stood for in my article.
Imagine yourself in an animated social intercourse with a friend.
He is telling you about this movie he thoroughly enjoyed. Then it dawns on you that you know this other movie that falls precisely in that genre.
To emphasize the point, you may say, “you MUST watch Homeland because it is exactly the kind you talking about”.
In this sentence, you are not commanding them. Instead, you are emphasizing and complementing what they are saying. It is their kind of movie.
Similarly, if I sat with Hichilema face-to-face, I would say, “Mr. President, you MUST meet Lumumba. You guys will get along very well”.
This is because I will have identified common grounds. Don’t you want to hear what academicians think about your work?
They use the work of politicians and turn it into a body of knowledge and teach it to students.
This is how a university in Scotland awarded Hichilema an Honorary doctorate. It was in recognition of his free education policy.
President Hichilema appreciates things academic. This is why you hear him use the word “methodical” so many times.
This is why you hear him repeatedly saying education is an equalizer. He is a living testimony of what education can do.
You think he only wants to meet business people because he is a businessman?
No, you read him wrongly. You don’t know him well enough to appreciate that he enjoys a good argument which an academic can engage with him respectfully and privately.
You don’t know that he has a good appreciation of geopolitics and their dynamics and that he, like Lumumba, is a Pan-Africanist.
Why do you think he is building a power interconnector with Tanzania; a multipurpose oil pipeline with Namibia, and transport corridors linking Zambia with the rest of the region?
Why do you think he now talks value-addition to get the most out of our minerals, the same policy many other Africans are pursuing?
Why do you think he wants to tap into the electric vehicle industry in Uganda?
Why do you think he signed all those MoUs with Ghana recently?
It is because Hichilema is a Pan-Africanist. It’s just that you, his supporters, can’t read him correctly.
In simple terms, a Pan-Africanist must look out for the continent’s interests in all they do.
They must do business with fellow Africans so that benefits circulate in and around the continent.
So, getting the two together – one, a Head of State while the other a Professor – can only be mutually beneficial.
Having listened to Lumumba while sitting in a casual set-up, I can confidently tell President Hichilema like a friend would to another, “You WANT to meet this guy, you MUST meet the man”