Can anyone cheat all the people all the time? At a glance, one would be inclined to say ‘yes’ depending on the circumstances. But most people would agree with Abraham Lincoln’s enduring assertion that, “You can cheat some of the people some of the time, but you can not cheat all the people all the time.”
That is what comes to mind every time I remember the depressing story and demise of a man I knew as a great lover of the Queen’s language, soccer and the workers that he led as ‘Chairman-General’ of the Zambia Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), Frederick Chiluba.
He and I had struck up some rapport because, as a keen follower of Rhokana United, the ‘Red Devils, he would every Monday morning phone the Times of Zambia Sports Desk to commend me for writing ‘so beautifully about your team, Mighty Mufulira Wanderers’ but that I seemed to struggle to find the right words to describe how his team performed. It was a sweet and enduring friendly rivalry, so to speak.
As a result, I do not know – and will probably never know – exactly at what point Mr Chiluba was ‘recruited’ into active politics, especially as president of the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD). All I remember is that on two separate occasions, he told me that there would be ‘a second revolution’ in Zambia. He never indicated how that would happen, however.
The first time he made the prediction was at the Ndola Central Hospital. I had gone to the Medical Clinic for my routine check-up at the Outpatient Department (OPD).
As usual, the place was teeming with patients. It was a scene of organised chaos, as people milled around or waited impatiently to be seen by the few overworked doctors on duty. I remember one abrasive and frustrated Nigerian doctor shouting at his patient — from behind the curtain — that he could not “prescribe any injection” for him because “there are no injections for pimples”.
We all laughed when the embarrassed gentleman emerged from the doctor’s room, bearing a small white paper but sweating profusely as if he just had a bruising round with former world heavyweight boxing champion, Mohammad Ali.
It was a time of acute shortages of nearly everything in Zambia, including essential drugs; so patients were advised to go and buy their medicines from private pharmacies. After being attended I left, but Mr Chiluba, who was still standing on the queue and leaning against the wall, as all benches were occupied, saw me and beckoned.
Looking at me with one eye slightly closed, I remember him saying something like, “can anyone seriously talk of increased productivity when people who should be at work are made to spend the whole day waiting on queues?” He spoke in passing about what caused the French Revolution before adding literally in a soliloquy that:  “Ba Mulenga (he always called me ‘Mr. Mulenga’) there will be a second revolution in Zambia”.
The first was in 1964 when the country, as Northern Rhodesia then, gained its independence from Britain on October 24.
The second time he made reference to a second revolution, which I did not take seriously because it not only sounded far-fetched but also impossible considering the fact that his perceived “Goliath” even had access to the use of superior fire power, was at the Ndola bus rank.
It is no longer a state secret that Mr Chiluba (he deserves ungrudging admiration for it) started his long walk to State House as a bus conductor in Kitwe. So when he saw me at the end of a long queue of passengers travelling to Kitwe, he broke into a fit of laughter. FTJ, as the Post newspaper often referred to him in later years, had an infectious laughter. So I could not help but laugh with him.
Returning to the roots? Old habits die hard, I thought.
“What is the big editor doing in a queue? What has happened to your company car?” he asked me instead.
When I told him what had transpired, he looked up in the heavens (Chiluba was a preacher and declared Zambia a Christian nation), cupped his hands in front of his chest like a soccer striker does when he misses a penalty or his hard shot sails over the bar.
“Yaba elyo ba-UNIP bapwa (It just goes to show that UNIP is finished, as a ruling party). Is that what they have done? It’s a scandal because after so many years of independence how do they bring a white man to run a party newspaper?” he asked rhetorically.
He then told me why he would not accept a presidential appointment either the UNIP central committee or Cabinet. He believed that ideally professionals like Mrs Patronela Chisanga, the managing director of NAMECO, would not have entertained such a retrogressive step.
Bana (Mrs) Chisanga should not have allowed it but she is a political appointee anyway. That is why I do not like being appointed because if you are appointed you must be prepared to be ‘dis-appointed’ by the appointing authority,” he said.
He was reacting to the fact that the Nissan Sunny car I had been using when I doubled the role of chief sub-editor and acting deputy managing editor had been withdrawn and given to in-coming expatriate. This was after Mr Naphy Nyalugwe and his assistant then Mr Namushi Nyambe was suspended.
What transpired is that Mr Cyrus Sikazwe, who was then the news editor based in Lusaka, was appointed Acting Editor-in-Chief while I was – for administrative convenience – asked to deputise him from the Ndola office. But to the shock of most workers, UNIP big wigs in Lusaka seem to have lost their faith in indigenous editors and voted to hire an Englishman, as managing editor.
Like a bolt from the blue, Mrs Dorothy Musokotwane, our personnel manager rung me in the evening from Lusaka saying, ‘Please pick up Mr Peter Langford, the new Times/Printpak Managing Editor, who should be landing at Ndola Airport around 21 hours.,
“You are also to surrender the company car to Mr Langford; it is an instruction from NAMECO,” she said and put down the receiver. What? What do I say to my two kids, Paul and Natasha who had to be dropped at late Mr Fidelis Kangwa’s Modern Primary School in President Avenue the following morning? It was an unexpected bombshell for a party card-carrier who was religiously assured that “it pays to belong to UNIP.”
But thank heavens, Peter Langford turned out to be an angel. He arrived with his two sons as his American wife had found Africa “a bit uncomfortable for her” and had decided to fly to “Boston or Chicago or wherever…”
Did I deserve to know all this? He seemed to have been reading my thoughts because he retorted, “Just in case you’re wondering why the sons but no mother?”
He surprised me when he said I should keep the car and just pick him up from his home in Petauke Crescent, Kansenshi, after I had taken my children to school in the morning.
Mr Komani Kachinga, who was until then Zambia Daily Mail Editor-In-Chief, replaced Mr Nyalugwe. So Peter was reporting to him.
As calls for an end to single-party regimentation and a return to multiparty participatory democracy echoed throughout the country, Mr Kachinga was removed to give way to former University of Zambia (UNZA) lecturer, Mr Bwendo Mulengela.
However, the hour of great reckoning had arrived and nothing could halt the ‘second revolution’ that Mr Chiluba predicted for the first time when we met by accident at the Ndola Central Hospital’s Outpatients Department and second time at the bus station where he was escorting his uncle who had been visiting from Chililabombwe.
The last time we met was at Sir Seretse Khama International Airport when he flew into Botswana on a state visit, as the second president of the Republic of Zambia. First secretary at the Zambian High Commission in Botswana, whom I had met in Nairobi in 1983 when Mr Kachinga introduced us to each other, secured me a vantage position on the line of Zambians resident in Botswana who were at the airport to receive the new visiting head of state. After airport formalities during which he inspected a guard of honour mounted by members of the Botswana Defence Force (BDF) and witnessed by president Sir Ketumile Masire and First Lady Oarabile Masire, Mr Chiluba and his entourage then came over to where we had lined up to greet them.
Apparently, he did not seem to realise that I was there until former First Lady Vera Chiluba spotted me and said, “Mwe batubutuka mukabwela lilali?” (You, who have run away from us, the new rulers, when are you likely to return?).
I replied, jokingly, of course, that I would definitely return ‘if the president gives me a job’. It was then that he saw me and said, “I did not know you were also here in Botswana.”
At the height of economic hardship, many young Zambian professionals, like doctors, nurses, pharmacists, journalists, secondary school teachers and university lecturers left for countries like Botswana and South Africa in search of greener pastures. It was a huge brain-drain whose impact is still being felt today.
So when I remember and think about our last ‘face-to-face’ meeting on foreign soil at the Sir Seretse Khama Airport, his revolutionary predictions and contributions to genuine citizen economic empowerment certain things do not seem to add up, especially in the context of events leading to his death.
When news reached Botswana that Chiluba had died, I remember a group of Zambians in Gaborone who often meet at a place called Pop-Inn, could not believe it because “the man seems to have fully recovered”.
Some suggested that Zambia probably needs a truth and reconciliation commission, like the one South Africa undertook at the end apartheid in 1994, so that people can come forward and confess – if they have to – or speak freely about what they know to be the truth. I agreed with the guys.
Plunderer?  Who is ready to cast the first stone?
India’s independence hero, the inspirational Mahatma Gandhi once said, “An error does not become truth by reason of multiplied propagation, nor does truth become error because nobody sees it. Truth stands, even if there is no public support. It is self sustained.” Well, there you have it.