Presidential Dinners
By Dickson Jere
It is becoming a custom now in Zambia for the ruling party to organize dinner dance or “Meet and Greet” the President as part of fundraising. The President gives out his personal apparels and effects to the party to auction. However, the difficulties with these events is that anyone – I mean – anyone with money can find himself at the event. Since tickets are sold and auction done from the party side, it is usually difficult to screen the attendees. During our time, in Rupiah Banda MMD, we had one successful dinner but the second one caused drama. It was a big PR mess that I even recorded it in my book.
I wrote in 2014, at page 65 of my Book – Inside the Presidency – the following;
“The governing party invited the President to a fund-raising dinner. The President obliged and attended as Guest of Honour. The party requested to auction some of the President’s personal items for huge amounts of money. A seat on the President’s table was fought over by businessmen who outbid each other.
While at dinner, the master of ceremonies announced the last auction of the night. It was lunch with the President with whoever won the bid.
‘Going, going gone!’ the master of ceremonies hit the hammer.
A prominent businessman had won the bid. We were not told who it was.
The following morning, the press had a story saying that the President had accepted to have lunch with a well-known corruption convict, businessman Anuj Kumar Rathi.
‘I didn’t even know who won the auction,’ the President told me when he read the stories.
I had to cancel the date and inform the nation of the President’s instruction.
‘Since it had come to the attention of the President that the winner of the lunch was a known convict, it would be morally unacceptable to go ahead and eat with him,’ I said in statement.
The President also asked the party to return the funds that were donated by Rathi, saying his government abhorred any corruption.”
Lessons from the archives!