Open letter to the President of Zambia, Hakainde Hichilema

An Open Letter to the President of Zambia, Hakainde Hichilema: I will not be silenced until death or a better Zambia emerges, whichever comes first

Dear President Hichilema,

Yesterday, I received the message below from someone who appears to be a well-meaning insider in your administration, a message whose essence underscores one key point: that your governance strategy is to destroy anyone who exposes the problems that your leadership has unleashed on poor Zambians, not to address the identified challenges:

"Hello Dr Sishuwa. You don't know me. And you don't have to. You also don't need to know where I got your number. And don't reply at all. Here is the message. Please don't come to Zambia. Under any circumstances. I repeat: Please do not come to Zambia for now for anything that may need you to travel. And also, take precautions for safety even that side. What these people are planning against YOU is EVIL. There's just so much hatred and strong desperation to silence divergent views and critical voices or independent minds. Anonymous."

Your agents must have informed you by now that I have recently survived another attempt on my life in a foreign land. I am under no illusion about who is behind these desperate acts. And before I go further, I appeal to you not to ask your officials or third-party shadows to respond to what I am stating in this letter, as you tend to do. I respect their willingness to defend you, but this letter is addressed to YOU, not them or anyone else. Be man enough and deny the truths I am stating in this letter yourself, if you believe they are false. This will then give me the opportunity to expose you without any inhibitions.

Please note that I do not fear you, just like I did not fear any of your predecessors, even with the backing of the State power that Zambian presidents like to abuse and unleash on their critics and political opponents. Without the power of the State, you are just an ordinary person, and one with remarkably limited powers of persuasion or reason. I am aware of the risks of criticising an incumbent president with a fragile ego like yours. I know you have resources and global connections that could be used against me. I am also aware of your admiration for the leader of an East African country (whose identity I will not disclose at this point) and your efforts to learn from their tactics in silencing opponents and critics, even those outside the country.

As you are aware, your agents – usually a male and a female – have turned up at my workplace at different times, claiming to be my relatives. Fortunately, they have found my colleagues, not me, on each occasion. On a recent visit, when one of my colleagues tried to photograph them so that I could be made aware of their presence, they immediately ran away, though CCTV images showed them to be total strangers to me. I have been trailed several times by different people I do not know. 

My emails have been hacked and sometimes disappeared while reading them. Social media pages aligned to your party have previously published false posts claiming that I had been shot at and was "nursing gun-shot wounds in a business deal gone bad." The motive here is clear: to manufacture the illusion that my imminent death would have nothing to do with your increasingly repressive regime but is a result of South Africa's high crime rate. The truth is that I work solely as an academic and have no business dealings whatsoever in South Africa.

Some of the threats I have received are chilling. I recognise that the risks are real. I am aware that my life is in danger. But please know one thing: until you kill me, my voice will never be silenced. I cherish my freedom and am prepared to fight anyone and anything that interferes with that freedom. I am convinced that liberty is the right of every person to be honest both with others and especially with themselves, to think and to speak without hypocrisy. I am consistent in my beliefs, many of which have taken root and become purified. This partly explains why I am extremely deliberate and rigid in my actions.

It is possible that you and your agents may take me down one day. I do not seek death, but I recognise that it is increasingly within the logical realm of possibility. Without being paranoid, I have long prepared for the possibility of being harmed. In my many years of work under the clouds of state security and other hostile forces, including under your predecessors, I have learnt that my personal behaviour is my first and last shield.

As your agents already know, I do not drink. I do not party. I eat only where I know there is little chance of someone smuggling something into my food. Or else, I prepare my own food. I do not overly react to people I do not know, no matter how familiar they may appear to be: I will always ask, politely, to be told who they are! I do not easily get provoked, no matter how offensive the aggressor maybe, especially if I do not know them. I avoid and abhor personal physical violence.

I avoid moving around at night. Even during the day, my movements are typically quite unpredictable, seldom following the same route more than once in a day or week. Over time, these behaviours have become second nature and do not disrupt my daily life. I know that this kind of transparency is uncharted territory for you, but I say all this to emphasise the point that I am not reckless. I am extremely careful.  

I know that while I am making many good friends with my public commentaries and writings, I am also earning myself enemies, some of whom may be quite happy to see me occupy a cemetery plot any day soon. This explains why I am prepared for you, the same way I prepared myself well against your predecessor.  I do not underestimate your capacity, but you will have to work a little bit harder to take me down. The best option would be for you to do everything necessary to lure me to travel to Zambia where you and your supporters can more easily finish me off, to hire mercenaries to shoot me dead here in South Africa, or to abduct, torture, and then kill me – the way your agents seem to have done with Francis Kapwepwe, popularly known as "Why Me".

However, until you eliminate me or become a better president, which includes abandoning your sustained assault on Zambia's democracy and improving the material conditions of the ordinary Zambian, you will have to endure my voice. Many will call me an adventurer, and that I am – only of a different sort: one who risks everything to live the dictates of his conscience and give full expression to the courage of his convictions. If there is anything I have learnt from this path, it is that sometimes, in acting on our beliefs and being loyal to our convictions, we become a threat to aspiring autocrats, corrupt and sectarian leaders, lying and unpatriotic presidents, together with their zealot supporters.

I am sorry to have to write to you this way, Mr President. I urge you to give my letter no other importance than that of an expression of raw feelings caused by what I consider to be a self-inflicted affront. In 2021, I voted for you in the belief that you would be a better leader than your predecessor, whose administration tried to have me arrested on a charge of sedition for the crime of holding the government to account. (In case you have forgotten, here is a small reminder of the many threats that I had to endure under your predecessor: https://mg.co.za/africa/2021-04-30-international-academics-reject-sedition-charge-against-zambias-dr-sishuwa/
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I must admit that I was mistaken in my initial judgment of you. For example, I believed you would not divide Zambia along ethnic and regional lines like your predecessor. I now see that my assumptions were incorrect. Since your election, you have been implementing an extreme sectarian political agenda, under the unstated motto of ‘One Zambia, One Region', and expanded the law on hate speech to include any criticism of your leadership actions that show how you have deeply polarised Zambia on ethno-regional and political lines.

Given the mistreatment you suffered at the hands of your undemocratic predecessor (s) during your decade and half in opposition politics, I thought you would be the reformist leader Zambia needed to reclaim its democracy. Again, I was mistaken. In power, you have turned to be nearly everything you detested about your predecessor, and, in some cases, much worse. After you commendably abolished the law on defamation of the president, you quickly turned to other repressive statutes to arrest critics and political opponents on a variety of charges such as sedition, criminal libel, hate speech, espionage, and unlawful assembly. Today, nearly all opposition leaders are either in court, in jail, or six feet under the ground – thanks in part to your administration's horrible treatment of these fellow citizens when they were alive. Under your watch, the nation's democracy is essentially non-existent. This is not the Zambia I envisaged under your leadership when I voted for you.

I thought you were a patriot and a Pan-Africanist. Again, I was mistaken. As you know very well, less than a week after your inauguration, you disappointed me by assuring then United States President Joe Biden that you were willing to: (i) host the United States AFRICOM centre in Lusaka as a Southern African Development Community (SADC) operations centre; (ii) work closely with the United States to contain the influence and hostile policies of China and Russia in the SADC region, African Union, and the United Nations; and (iii) be the carrier of technical and financial support to opposition "progressive leaders" who must take control in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Uganda, South Africa, and others I do not need to remind you. All these disappointing decisions contradict the principles of patriotism and Pan-Africanism.

Incredibly, you also told then US President Biden that you were going to protect the human rights of "all Zambian citizens without discrimination based on…sexual orientation, LGBTQ+ orientation". You lied to Biden that you would protect the human rights of the LGBTQ+ community in Zambia knowing fully well this was a promise you could not keep, like so many others. Since then, you have gone on to violate the constitutionally guaranteed human rights of all Zambians including free expression, peaceful assembly, and freedom of association.

Today, nearly four years after I cast my vote for you, you have generally proved to be just another corrupt African leader. You do not even have the decency to publish the assets and liabilities that you declared to the Electoral Commission of Zambia in 2021 ahead of the election. I now understand why: it is because you did not have the wealth that many had mistakenly assumed you had prior to the 2021 election. It is only now, when in power, that you are using public office to accumulate and build your wealth. 

Foreign mining companies are having a field day in Zambia today, thanks to you and many of your senior officials. Together, you have proved to be little more than those who came before you: a shameless set of corruptible leaders, who have betrayed Zambia to foreign commercial interests, who pawn off the country for a few trinkets, who accumulate through the brazen theft of public resources and massive sale of Zambian assets to so-called investors, and who strut around with self-importance when they are nothing but disposable playthings of even bigger global kleptocrats.

My heart and soul continue to be pained by the pitiful state of our wretched existence today and a hard realisation that Zambia, under your watch, is being completely ripped off by a very shadowy partnership between state actors and foreign mining companies – it seems all the mining companies have to do is to pay peanuts into the back pockets of a few corrupt politicians, laughably known as our government. As I write this, I am unsuccessfully fighting back tears when I think about the subhuman existence of many ordinary Zambians including those in whose eyes death is already shining  or those whom your police officers recently murdered in Mufumbwe while they were scrounging for a living.  

When I think of the rich mineral wealth that our homeland has and the abject poverty and extremely poor conditions under which majority of ordinary Zambians continue to live, I cannot help noticing the tragic failure of leadership on the part of leaders like you and the self-serving elite at the heart of public life, including those who occupy key positions in several state institutions and are complicit in the selling of Zambia and in sustaining our state of backward poverty and extreme cultural impoverishment.  Only a president who serves their pockets and foreign interests, who is totally removed from their immediate surroundings, who has no genuine concern for the poor, and who has no love for their homeland can easily find sleep under such miserable conditions or heap praise on themselves for their supposed accomplishments, as you so often do. 

I can go on and discuss many other things I know which demonstrate that you are unfit to govern and a disgrace to the presidency. These include your dishonourable role in the sale of Konkola Copper Mines and Mopani Copper Mines, and your connections to the British through Tony Blair, with whom you started working in the run-up to the 2016 election as you planned to accept IMF and World Bank prescriptions to remove subsidies and disinvestment of the remaining state-owned companies. I can also provide greater detail on how you have lamentably failed when it comes to the bigger national issues, such as safeguarding our cherished democracy, getting the best out of Zambia's mineral wealth, respecting the Constitution and the rule of law, fighting corruption beyond rhetoric, genuinely promoting national unity and equitable distribution of appointments to public service positions, and more urgently, sorting out the cost-of-living crisis and the deplorable conditions of life for most Zambians.

I can talk about how you and the two officials you are working with on constitutional reform planned to pay every lawmaker up to K2 million to support Bill 7 and secure your desperate bid to lengthen your stay in power. But I won't. Not today. In any case, it will be pointless for me to do so since you have repeatedly shown that you are not my president. You are president of your business interests, of foreign commercial interests, and of Zambians who are ethnic nationalists and regional supremacists.

Rest assured that using my pen and voice, I will keep fighting in my little corner for a better Zambia until victory or death, whichever comes first. I have no doubt that the willpower I have polished with an artist's delight will sustain my sometimes-shaky legs and weary mind in moments of gloom and adversity. For the love of the nation and in the service of public interest, I am prepared to risk everything, including my very last breath.

To any ordinary Zambian reading this letter, please give a thought occasionally to this fellow ordinary citizen. The truth is that I mean well and care less about who is in State House, as long as they are serving the national interest as the Constitution requires them to do. Once elected leaders betray public trust, we must let them know, regardless of the consequences that may come our way for doing so. It would give me great pleasure to wake up to a better Zambia, one day, in my lifetime. And should you wake up to news of my death tomorrow or the day after, I send you a huge hug as an advance goodbye and a simple appeal: please continue the fight, because a better country is possible.

Lover of Zambia and sometimes of anything else,
Sishuwa Sishuwa