By Sishuwa Sishuwa
Andrew Ejimadu alias Seer 1
The flamboyant Nigerian self-styled prophet Andrew Ejimadu, popularly known as Seer 1, arrived in Zambia around 2010, grew his ministry over the next seven years and became part of the protestant Christian community.
As well as rooting himself in the country’s spiritual fabric, he also began to rub shoulders with the powerful political elites in president Lungu’s Cabinet.
Somehow, he fell out with the authorities, who deported him in April 2017. By that time, however, he had become a Zambian by faith and learnt three things about many of the people he was leaving behind: their gullibility, hypersensitivity to the occult and Christian fundamentalism.
Using South Africa as his base and Facebook as his organising platform, Seer1 held a series of online meetings in which he railed against the then ruling PF. Initially, many saw his antics as motivated by vendetta following his deportation.
As such, in the beginning, his live chats provided the much-needed comical relief in what was a highly polarised and depressing pre-election environment. Things changed in 2021 when Seer 1transformed himself into a well-informed analyst of Zambian politics, mixing the ultra-bizarre (claims that the PF would lose because he had withdrawn the black magic that he gave them to win power in 2015 and 2016) and the sensible (sound understanding and analysis of the country’s geopolitics, economic issues and how Lungu’s failure to tackle corruption made his electoral defeat an inevitable reality). At his peak, his online live rallies would attract as many as 30,000 viewers on a single platform – a feat that no Zambian influencer, artist, or media institution has ever achieved.
Whatever his intentions and motivations, Seer 1, through his persistent rantings against the governing elites, made two significant contributions to Zambians’ struggle to rid themselves of a repressive regime and achieve political change. First, he raised the levels of civic awareness in a population that is prone to clerical mobilisations and where political messages are sometimes more effective when delivered in a religious language.
Second, he exploited Zambians’ deep connection to faith to generate a national psyche of expectation that president Lungu would, regardless of whatever attempts he makes to stay in power, lose the election. In an environment in which the governing party had looked invincible insofar as their removal from office was concerned, the Nigerian prophet presented God as a proud partisan who was set to deliver a miracle: the destruction of the invincible via the ballot!”
Edgar Lungu
After many years of sliding into authoritarianism and acute economic decline, Zambia reclaimed its democracy and set itself on a possible path to economic recovery with the election of Hichilema in August 2021. Ironically, one person who deserves much credit for this change in direction is former president Edgar Lungu. So calamitous was his leadership that he inadvertently united most Zambians to register as voters and oust him via the ballot. Ordinarily, it takes many people and institutions to raise the collective civic consciousness of a population. Thanks to his incompetence, Lungu achieved this task almost single-handedly.
Then, despite all his anti-democratic machinations before the vote, after losing it, he gracefully conceded (though not before negotiating terms with his would-be successor), congratulated the president-elect, and presided over a smooth transition. It is worth noting that Lungu could have challenged Hichilema’s election in the Constitutional Court, an option that is available to any losing presidential candidate. Had he done so, it is not inconceivable that the court, which was widely seen as biased in his favour, would have invented reason to nullify the election of Hichilema. Such a decision may have triggered violent protests and plunged the country into turmoil. Democracy usually thrives on unwritten norms. In many cases, these turn out to be more important than the written rules. Although Lungu’s concession was strictly not necessary, it was crucial to paving the way for a smooth transition and consolidating Zambia’s culture of peaceful transfers of power whenever an incumbent is defeated.
Hakainde Hichilema
Hakainde Hichilema has stood in successive elections since 2006, but it was as if everything he did in the past was preparing him for 2021. At a critical moment, he emerged to carry the aspirations of a generation, serve as a symbol of what is possible, and inspire the hopes of so many millions of Zambians who, overwhelmed with a collective sense of hopelessness, were on the brink. These included the ordinary citizen weighed down by the high cost of living, the common man and woman eking out a living from the street, the impoverished parent who could no longer afford to send their child to school, the student whose living allowance was withdrawn at short notice by the Lungu administration, the restless graduate looking for a formal job, and the withered retiree whose benefits remained unpaid years after serving Zambia so diligently.
Others were the dismissed, dispirited or highly indebted public sector workers including the poorly paid teacher and health worker, the marginalised citizen in rural communities, the urbanite who longed for a return to law and order, the soldier living in deplorable conditions and barracks unrenovated since Kenneth Kaunda’s day, the professional police officer fed up of receiving instructions from the political elites in power, the small-scale entrepreneur whose concerns went unnoticed, the hardworking farmer whose yield went to waste or fetched a price that hardly met the cost of production, and the mineworker who sought a win-win solution to the challenges at Mopani and Konkola Copper Mines.
All these diverse interests and dreams were placed into the custody of Hichilema, an enormous load for one person to bear and which I suspect keeps him awake at night. Will he disappoint or will he deliver? Time will tell. Neighbouring countries scheduled to host elections over the course of the next few years, such as Zimbabwe in 2023, will likely look to Zambia for evidence of the effects of political change.
Source: Sishuwa Sishuwa, Class of 2021: Zambians who inspired last year, News Diggers, 6 January 2022