ONE ZAMBIA, ONE NATION, SAID KAUNDA. ENTER HICHILEMA: ONE ZAMBIA, ONE NATION. ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE.

By Kellys Kaunda

ONE ZAMBIA, ONE NATION, SAID KAUNDA. ENTER HICHILEMA: ONE ZAMBIA, ONE NATION. ONE NATION, ONE PEOPLE.

Presidents are the most watched individuals and the most scrutinized.

Their clothing, their interactions with others and every word that comes out of their mouths can be subjects of intense debate.

Basically, there’s a good reason: they are the most influential people in a given nation-state.

For instance, during the signing into law of Bill 7, President Hichilema added the words “one people” to Kaunda’s slogan of “One Zambia, One Nation” so that it comes out as “One Zambia, One Nation. One Nation, One People”.

That caught my attention. Why “one people” when the word nation itself means one people?

Didn’t the President know this or does he want posterity to remember him for something?

Or, there was something else on his mind?

I think the starting point should be with Kaunda who popularized the phrase.

Kaunda was confronted with the daunting task of building one nation out of over 70 ethnic groups with each demanding a stake in the new state.

He needed to find all kinds of innovative ways to build one nation hence the slogan: One Zambia, One Nation.

However, even if we have been an independent state for slightly over 60yrs, the nation-building project remains an ongoing agenda on the table of every President.

There’s no President that has never faced this challenge. So, every one of them has had to find innovative ways of rallying the citizens of this country around the notion of nationhood.

One typical characteristic of the Hebrew Biblical text is how it restates one particular term by using a different word.

It is meant to emphasize the point and not an expression of the ignorance of the rules of grammar or redundancy in wording.

Hichilema, like every President before him, is facing the challenge of building and holding the country’s various ethnic groupings into one nation state.

That to me is my guess as to what was on his mind when he said: One Zambia, One Nation. And one nation, one people.