Zambia’s waterfall politics

Frederick Chiluba, the tiny trade unionist he jailed but trounced Kaunda in the last election he contested, also came from Congolese Baluba people made foreign by European boots. Chiluba declared Kaunda a non-citizen. A policeman’s bullet cruised across Kaunda’s skull. President Mandela hurriedly hid him away in South Africa. Chiluba migrated from a land that had […]

Frederick Chiluba, the tiny trade unionist he jailed but trounced Kaunda in the last election he contested, also came from Congolese Baluba people made foreign by European boots. Chiluba declared Kaunda a non-citizen. A policeman’s bullet cruised across Kaunda’s skull. President Mandela hurriedly hid him away in South Africa.
 Chiluba migrated from a land that had already assassinated its first prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Zambia has the credit of having its first two presidents being pan-African.
River Zambezi gets its waters from Congo DR, Angola, Malawi and Mozambique; while Zambia’s population shares bloodlines across borders with Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania and Congo DR. Only the Democratic Republic of Congo surpasses her in this branch of population-border pan-Africanism. Only Congo DR also overtakes her in harvesting   cauldrons of wars and blood-letting that has come with sharing borders. Following the cross-border war that doomed Mobutu’s three decades of disastrous rule, the country has lost over 5 million people to locusts of violence crossing her peace.
At the outset of Kenneth Kaunda’s guidance, Zambia bravely faced a ring of vulne-rability to hostile European settlers in Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique. The grand rock of hostility to Black Power was in apartheid South Africa.   Kaunda conducted eyeball to eyeball talks with John Vorster on a train in a search for an end to these racial dictatorships. In a bold refusal to bend to a blockage by Ian Smith in Rhodesia and John Vorster in South Africa to transport routes for his country’s imports and exports, Kaunda turned to a cross-border railway from Tanzania’s port of Dar-es Salaam to Lusaka. Banking on the politics of non-alignment, Kaunda and Mwalimu Nyerere in Tanzania turned to China for the equipment, skill and labour to build the TAZARA railway line. It was Africa‘s ‘Rail line of Liberation’ because it allowed Kaunda and Nyerere to continue supporting liberation wars then raging in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Mozambique, South Africa, Namibia and Angola. Kaunda must have known that River Zambezi would outlive racist rule.   Memories of TAZARA now dim under post-Cold War amnesia.
 Kaunda probably imbibed Pablo Neruda’s poetic line that the ‘sea works and works in his silence’ as he saw foams of surging and tossing waters at Victoria Falls. Chiluba’s daring to wish the assassination of a founding father of a nation and life-line of liberation struggles may be traced to trade unionism training that irreverence that pits angered sweat and grime on workers against perfumed faces of employers.
Officials of the Organi-sation of African Unity recall Kaunda, Nyerere and Milton Obote as the grand trio of intellectual labourers who plotted Africa’s future long after fun-loving leaders had fled to dance parties by Mobutu or Omar Bongo. Bongo ruled Gabon for 40 years. He wore platform shoes. Chiluba also adorned platform shoes, and rivalled Captain Thomas Sankara (of Burkina Faso) in cracking jokes as leaders rode on a bus to Africa Hall. It must take a rare sense of humour to anticipate a political assassination.
It was an act of rare diplo-matic courage to call the bluff of Euro-American money and call on Communist China for loans; grants, technology and construction expertise, for realising TAZARA. Its legacy and flavour was echoed in recent hostility by many elites in Africa and among the African Diaspora to Ethiopia taking a loan from China for the construction of a headquarters for the African Union. “China’s ambassador to Zambia, Zhou Yuxiao, suggests that China benefited from a ‘’positive role played by foreign direct investment’’ to meet shortages of domestic capital. It is probably this wisdom which made Michael Sata, Zambia’s current president; contest an election on a pledge to throw Chinese businesses out of Zambia, and after winning turn around to welcome Chinese investments. Zambia and Ethiopia have shown a new courage against China-phobia.
 By the end of 2012 China’s investments in Zambia totalled 2.5 billion dollars; holding 60% of infrastructure market; 50 % of construction equipment market, and 20% of mining projects in 2009. 13 Chinese companies installed 780 dollars worth of material in the ‘’Zambia-China Economic and Trade Cooperation Zone’’. To catch tax dodgers government created an ‘’electronic repor-ting and monitoring system’’ to ensure collection of royalties and taxes.
This economic ‘’partner-ship’’ has its warts. Ambassador Yuxiao claimed that in 2011 Zambia was ‘’enjoying a trade surplus of 2.17 billion dollars’’. China hauls raw copper slabs, gemstones and coal from Zambia. The dollar value of the various products manufacturers in China made out of these raw materials is not mentioned by Yuxiao. He is probably restrained by the etiquette of diplomatic pepper soup. The ambassador makes the fascinating point that following the 2008 financial crisis, China protected Zambia’s economy by her policy of “3 NOs’’, of ‘’not to reduce the investment; not to cut down production; and not to retrench a single worker’’. Education Minister, John Phiri said: ‘’Chinese people are our brothers and sisters’’.
Both Zambia and China have pushed their relationship to new frontiers. Chinese traders reach local markets at midnight hawking bigger chickens, and undercutting local women sellers.  In 2011 Chinese mine managers shot and wounded 11 angry workers. Workers killed one Chinese manager in 2012. In 2011 a ‘’Zambia Agricultural Technology Demonstration Centre’’ included 3000 square metres ground for drying maize.  It is not clear if the 300 Zambian students in China’s universities will come back as inventors and manufacturers. Chinese are owning land and learning local languages for ordering workers around. Perhaps the most remarkable result is the conservative American magazine, The New Yorker, warning Zambians against ‘’Chinese imperialism’’.