ZCCH-IH SHAREHOLDER MR. THIERY CHARLES IS A RACIST BIGOT, I ‘VE NO SHADOWY DEALINGS WITH THE COMPANY
CAPE TOWN, (Sunday,14 July 2024) — Whilst I have been abroad, it has been brought to my attention that Mr. Thierry Charles, a French national introducing himself as a spokesperson of the ZCCM-IH Limited minority shareholders has written a letter to His Excellency Mr. Hakainde Hichilema, President of the Republic of Zambia, and simultaneously circulated it to the media alleging corruption against the president’s unnamed aides, but strangely he maliciously links me to the emergency of the alleged “bad eggs” at State House.
I resigned from State House on 19 June 2019, and I have had no links with it whatsoever ever since.
Notwithstanding whatever merits or a lack thereof, of any such sleaze being alleged by Mr. Charles against State House, I find it preposterous in the extreme, and brazenly malicious, for this infantile, seemingly self-righteous Frenchman to be making such unsubstantiated allegations expressly calculated to besmirch my reputation, and ostensibly fuel false narratives that I am, or was ever involved in graft and embezzlement against ZCCM-IH.
Just when one thinks the bizarre profiling and malicious lies can’t t get any worse, the bar of depravity just gets lower.
To imagine that Mr. Charles, an investor who is supposed to stay outside the local political spectre, can dedicate so much time and resources from the distant Paris, to deploy such abhorrent, nihilistic malice to slander an innocent person, explains in the main, the blinding chaos in Zambia’s political and corporate corridors.
How can it be normal that someone from the very far, comfy and cozy Paris, should summon such false entitlement to spew totally false allegations against me, and seek to prescribe how a Zambian president (whether present, past or future), should pick or unpick their aides?
I cannot rationalise this diabolical and pervasive attack from Mr. Charles, but given my two previous racist encounters with him, I can only assume he has returned to the pit of hell from where he lobbied me to help him in a bid to try and remove the ZCCM-IH chief executive officer (CEO), Dr. Pius Kasolo and replace him with a carefully head-hunted “white” CEO. I resisted then, and still would, any attempts to draw me into such disgustingly low places.
Throughout my public service, I have dedicated considerable effort towards building a fair and humane society and therefore my outright rejection of Mr. Charles’s lobby was in line with my almost reflexive outrage at any ethnic and racial profiling which I consider as repulsive base instincts pointedly at variance with common decency.
For him to have suggested in 2018 and 2019 that the replacement of Dr. Kasolo with a “white” CEO was the panacea to the challenges the company faced, was simply wrong and improper.
Dr Kasolo, like Mr. Francis Kaunda, and Mr. Edward Shamutete before him, represented some of Zambia’s best and brightest leading lights in the fields of mining and mineral economics. I was therefore horrified at Mr. Charles’s racist approach suggesting that ZCCM-IH woes, (as he put it) would end with the replacement of Dr Kasolo with an expatriate CEO.
I do not have any position on the substance of his assertions of the emergency of the alleged “bad eggs” at State House, but I still find it oddly off, the condescending nature of Mr. Charles’s letter to the President. Apart from the caustic content of his malicious cable, even its delivery was strange.
For Mr. Charles to allude to the emergence of “bad eggs” in President Hichilema’s State House, operating, as he alleges, in the shadows where I supposedly operated to make personal gains, is to suggest that he knows of those shadowy dealings then, and now, and perhaps that I was in fact coaching the current aides, none of whom he names, but paradoxically, he proceeds to name in the most reckless of ways, without any basis whatsoever.
During my tenure in State House, in addition to my core duties as special assistant for press and public relations, President Lungu also appointed me to a special committee tasked to develop a stable, fair and sustainable mining tax regime. Under this assignment I encountered many mining executives and investors. This is when I came across Mr. Charles, who, during some of those consultations, lobbied me to join what he described as progressive forces working on a plan to oust Dr. Kasolo from his post. On several occasions, other than this one, I informed Dr Kasolo of such plans because my conscious was not clear about such motives, especially this particular manoeuvre from Mr. Charles.
In 2018 at the French National Day cocktail in Lusaka, and at another occasion ahead of the 2019 Mining Indaba in Cape Town, Mr. Charles directly asked me to join the forces that were plotting to remove Dr. Kasolo and support the appointment of a new “white” CEO. This was particularly troubling for me because a similar representation, though mildly, had been made to me three months earlier by another cabal of investors with a relationship with ZCCM-IH.
Implicit in this absurd mention of me by Mr. Charles, is the suggestion that I could be nurturing the alleged “bad eggs” at State House; that I was, and, or is still involved in some unsavoury actions to defraud ZCCM-IH; and, or that I am inspiring these State House bad eggs (his euphemism for corrupt officials).
Strangely, Mr. Charles does not tell the President whether he has eaten any of these bad eggs or he just ended at smelling them. Nor does he name any of them, which makes his allegations more scurrilous and most extraordinary, particularly when it comers his scandalous mention of me.
Government, as I understand it, is supposed to be a place of high concentration of skill and talent. And my approach to public service therefore, has been that it is a privilege to serve and not a fountain of food and drink at the expenses of the majority poor. I did not take anything from ZCCM-IH at all, nor indeed from any government coffers, any single cent I did not work for.
It has been five years now since I left government, and I therefore invite the likes of the racist Charles to tender before any lawfully constituted tribunal any evidence of such misdeeds. To hide behind hate-filled letters to the President, fully packed with unjustified slander, represents the lowest form of human expression, especially when the same is coming from a stranger and about a stranger. I do not know Mr. Charles at all, save for those two encounters which occurred during my course of duty. Mr Charles’s flurry of embellished letters to the President must always contain facts, uncontrived truths, and not speculative conjectures which only feeds into Lusaka’s despicable rumour mills.
It should be possible for a person to be able to offer their public service, pass on the button to others, and when there is nothing shady about them, to simply let them disappear into the sun-set and thank them for their service to the nation.
That is not say anybody is above the law when legitimate questions need to be asked. But no one is beneath the law either.
To whistle-blow against unnamed serving presidential aides, but proceed to name former aides of the former president is simply diabolical, and very extraordinary indeed.
In this vein, Mr. Charles’s letter serves very minimal or no purpose at all, but simply advances the now entrenched vile culture of criminalising public service, consequently discouraging some of the cream of our society from joining government.
The seven years I put into government, are some of the best years of my public service. To the best of my abilities, I made some sacrifices that oftentimes went beyond the normal call of duty, as is my personal work ethic. I therefore reject Mr. Charles’s mischaracterisation of my public service as shadowy and self-serving. Without any iota of evidence on his part, this kind of mischief will have consequences in due course.
Where does this obnoxious lynch-mob incitement stop? It is such actions by cheap anti-graft masquerades like Mr. Charles which feeds the malicious individuals who plant false narratives before the law enforcement agencies who end up opening false lines of inquiries against innocent people. This is why I feel duty bound to reluctantly, but decisively respond in great detail, to this irresponsible and utterly disgusting attack from Mr. Charles, some self-styled moralist passing off as a Zambian patriot.
I, for one, can’t succumb to any form of oppression, particularly laced with racist undertones such as this one from Mr Charles. Given another chance, I would still resist any racist approaches against myself or any other person. If that means Mr. Charles, half decade later, returning to take revenge by thrusting me into the unnamed basket of the rotten eggs he has smelt at State House, I still will stand my ground that removing a Zambian chief executive expressly to give way to a white one, would be wrong and improper.
As I do not know the current communications protocols of State House, I can only hazard an educated guess that it should still be rude and extremely inappropriate, that anybody should purport to send an important letter to the President and simultaneously publish it in the world-wide media. It is such condescending behaviour that betrays the insidious motives of Mr. Charles and consequently undermines its content.
It is at this point that I seek an honest answer from the board and management of ZCCM-IH to confirm or dismiss Mr. Thierry Charles’s letter to President Hichilema as their collective position of the company, or that of some of its shareholders as stated by this rather prolific writer and self appointed moral guardian of the soul of ZCCM-IH.
In his arrogant posturing, Mr. Charles seems to forget that ZCCM-IH is our, (Zambia’s) ‘family silver’ and we care deeply about it, perhaps more than he does. In his role as spokesperson for ZCCM-IH minority shareholders, Mr. Charles must not masquerade as a charity worker. He is simply a full, cold-blooded agent of the profit-seeking international capital.
In the meantime, my lawyers have assumed conduct of this matter.
— Ends —
——————————————————————————————————————————————————————
ORIGINAL SIGNED AND AUTHORISED FOR PUBLICATION BY:
Amos Chanda
Issued this 13 July 2024 at Cape Town, South Africa.