No, no, Sean Tembo; ECL and HH are Zambia’s worst presidents ever: Zambians must emphatically reject both of them and never, ever, put either of them into power, again!- Azwell Banda

No, no, Sean Tembo; ECL and HH are Zambia’s worst presidents ever: Zambians must emphatically reject both of them and never, ever, put either of them into power, again!



By Azwell Banda,



History has no reverse gears.

A leopard does not change its spots. Sean Tembo, president of Patriots for Economic Progress (PeP) now believes returning Edgar Chagwa Lungu (ECL) of the Patriotic Front (PF) back into power would be in the best interest of the nation. I beg to differ, most strongly. I find no better rebuttal to Sean Tembo’s extremely erroneous and very dangerous views than what I said on 5th April this year, on this column. I repeat, almost word for word, what I said on 5th April, below:

It gives me nightmares when I imagine Edgar Chagwa Lungu (ECL) of the Patriotic Front (PF) being elected president of Zambia, again. Hakainde Hichilema (HH) and the United Party for National Development (UPND) horrify me when I imagine how much destruction, mass poverty, deaths and foreign ownership and control of our natural resources they will have done to Zambia, even just in five years. Worse still, the possibility that these two – HH and ECL – embodiments of the most undemocratic, constitutional delinquency, criminal rule, authoritarianism, lies, corruption, fraud politicians of Zambia may somehow unite sends shivers down my spine.

Perfect political conditions have been created by lying Hakainde Hichilema and his hopeless, conceited and corrupt foreign-masters micro-managed UPND to politically launder ECL, and in the short space of less than three years, they have made ECL a real possible successor of Hakainde Hichilema. HH and the UPND humiliate all right-thinking Zambians whenever they remember how they were duped by the sanctimonious, fake “superior” logic, pretended advanced technocratic and fake democratic credential of HH and the UPND.

Nothing best confirms how rotten and expired our political system has become, 60 years after independence, than that a man and his party – Hakainde Hichilema and the UPND – who campaigned to undo almost everything that was wrong under the tyranny of the Patriotic Front (PF) in government have so successfully engineered conditions in which many Zambians now, concretely, suffer more than they did under the PF, and, like all such suffering people historically, now yearn even for the dark days of Edgar Chagwa Lungu and his abominable Patriotic Front. At least there was some food, then.

It is not meant to be like this: we are a natural resource rich country saddled with a disastrous political system designed and maintained to keep us chained to backwardness and poverty. Our post-independence economic and political systems have complexly expired: they cannot guarantee the majority of us the barest minimum to stay alive. Among other things, they no longer can guarantee the majority of us food, water, rent, electricity, transport, medicines and, yes, physical security from criminals! They are producing orphans more than they are multiplying jobs. They are condemning our youths who are the majority of Zambians to alcohol and drug abuse and addictions. They are turning millions of our young people into junkies. They have ruined even our already impoverished rural life. They are destroying our forests and natural environments by the need for charcoal for energy, among other causes.

Zambia is now faced with the possibility of returning or recycling political junk, in government. Or descend into outright national political anarchy, chaos and violence. This is because we, as a country and a people, are refusing to acknowledge that our post-colonial fake economy and its neo-colonial political system have both expired, and can now onwards only lead to national anarchy, chaos and violence. Any country whose government was formed after a party that had been in opposition, consistently, for more than two decades wins elections by a margin as large as the UPND did in August 2021 only to politically launder and make possible the return of the worst political tyrant the country has ever hard in its independence era barely three years thereafter has economic and political systems which are rotten to the core, and fit only for the dustbin of history. We can, and we must, imagine, vision and create a different country for ourselves, from the one we currently live in!  

To be clear, it is not that our political elites are uniquely born evil, or are any different from any of us. When in the opposition, some do even manage to convince themselves that they do believe they can contribute to solving many of our life and death problems and challenges. Our political elites after all, are also products of our rotten Zambian neo-colonial economy and society from whence we all come: they truly are our “representatives”.

Our political elites, including our “freedom fighters” have, since independence, only sustained us as a country and a people, in varying degrees as a neo-colony, as a country whose economy and politics are controlled by outside forces, including by our former colonial masters, the racist British. Sixty years after 1964, it is patently clear that our “independence” was only a facade to mask the continued economic and political domination by foreign powers over us, now using their local proxies: our political elites. Consistently, for 60 years now, our political elites have served the interests of imperialism rather than those of the majority of the people of Zambia. HH and the UPND are unique in that they do not hide all this: they openly and proudly serve the interests of our foreign masters.

Our native African colonial elites, and their post-colonial progeny, are generally drawn from the same class background as the former colonial rulers, they share the same religion and colonial cultural practices including language, have the same social and material interests as their colonial masters and therefore have a vested interest in maintaining and perpetuating the economic and political systems of exploitation inherited from colonialism. Being economically and financially weak, they are chronically dependent on foreign economic powers and our former colonial master.

Our colonial and post-colonial native African political elites, rather than dismantling the colonial class hierarchies colonial capitalism and imperialism created among us, consciously and unconsciously consolidate and reinforce them: for their survival; like our colonial masters, they need the bulk of us ignorant, poorly educated or completely illiterate, underfed or starving, unhealthy and so on, therefore thoroughly very fearful of them, politically weak, and therefore unable to challenge their authoritarian and undemocratic political dominance over us. For 60 years now, these political elites have entrenched themselves in positions of power and privilege while the majority of Zambians are hungry, unemployed, impoverished and marginalised.

More than any other political elites after our independence, HH and the UPND have contemptuously betrayed the ideals of our national liberation struggles by openly aligning themselves with foreign interests and perpetuating practices of oppression and exploitation similar to those under colonial rule: internally, the UPND has treated its opposition no different from how the colonial government treated our “freedom fighters” using the police and the public order colonial law.

That 60 years after our independence, today, six million Zambians face acute hunger and 80 per cent of our rural population are trapped in severe poverty is proof that our political colonial elites since independence have miserably failed to bring about genuine social change or address the underlying structures of inequality and injustice in Zambia. Instead, they all have betrayed our independence dream of a country free from poverty. They have maintained the colonial status quo of the majority of Zambians: chained to their poverty.

Precisely because our political elites are products of, and mimic our colonial masters, rather than promoting our national economic independence, self-sufficiency and development, they have maintained dependency on global capitalism. Without fail, apart from the ineffectual Kaunda period, they all prioritise the interests of multinational corporations and international financial institutions over the needs of the majority of Zambians.

HH and the UPND are merely using the political textbook of tyranny from which ECL and the PF read: their contempt and disrespect for Zambians (they lie even when there is no need to do so) and their suppression of dissent and the opposition to maintain their grip on power are all from the political toolkit of our colonial masters. Both HH and ECL have deep contempt for democracy and elections, know how to use political violence, and how to deploy the police against their rivals. We now know the UPND better, now that they are in government. 

Whether it is the Russians, Chinese, the US and the West, our political elites favour the plundering of national resources by foreign corporations and governments, while betraying the sovereignty and interests of Zambia, for personal gain and international favour. All of them have demonstrated a lack of faith and trust in the masses of Zambia capable of being their own liberators, economically and politically. In this, our political elites have ready support from our “educated Zambians” and “professionals” especially those educated in Western institutions and imbued with Western liberalism: these perpetuate and enforce mass consent of Western cultural, social, political and economic hegemony among us. They  promote Western values and norms among us at the expense of our struggle to free ourselves from the mental bondage of both colonialism and neo-colonialism.

As the hunger disaster and cholera epidemic were gathering pace, it is none other than the UPND Minister of Finance Situmbeko Musokotwane who argued that actually life in rural areas was better, as rural Zambians ate what they made and were not bothered about the rising prices of goods in urban areas, especially now that education was “free”! Having failed to address the inherited colonial structural injustices such as economic inequalities and foreign ownership of our strategic economic sectors, unequal access to resources, lack of social services, mass hunger, unemployment and poverty, all our political elites, upon assuming government office prioritise actions that benefit themselves and their allies, while exacerbating social divisions such as tribalism, and inequalities.

It is the possibility for the first time in our post-independence era, of returning into government a qualified dictator and tribalist, because a confirmed tribalist, liar and corrupt puppet of foreign powers has worsened our national mass hunger, unemployment, poverty and social, economic and political inequalities, barely three years upon forming government, that best confirms how rotten and expired are our post-colonial economy and political systems. It is time to think hard and imagine, vision and fight to create for ourselves an economic system fit for our true political emancipation. The real alternative is our inevitable descent into mass chaos, anarchy and violence.

It is wrong to think that Zambians are unthinking, unfeeling morons without a conscience and memory. Zambia has hundreds of thousands of men and women extremely capable of taking us beyond the corruption, looting, oppression, exploitation, suffering, pain and sorrow both faulty and extremely flawed ECL and HH have unleashed upon us. We only need to identify such a person, now, not in 2026. Edgar Chagwa Lungu and Hakainde Hichilema are not that person.



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