Natural scientists, perhaps more than anyone else, understand the vital value of intellectual honesty. Without it, they cannot do any of their work. Without it, science cannot make any progress at all.

What is intellectual honesty? It is better understood as the opposite of 'intellectual dishonesty'. To be intellectually dishonest is, in very simple terms, to know something in your mind and yet to deny it. In other words, intellectual dishonesty is a conscious denial of facts that you know are true. Different people become intellectually dishonest for different reasons. Intellectuals engaged in debate can sometimes choose to ignore facts just because they feel they need to win an argument, for egotistical reasons more than for truth and learning. This makes an argument irrational and therefore meaningless since the whole purpose of an argument is to establish facts through a rational process.

A scientist has no choice but to be committed to intellectual honesty. The tradition in the scientific community is to always put reality and facts above one's own opinions, no matter how strongly one has previously defended those opinions. If a scientist finds that an experiment contradicts what he previously thought or believed, he has the obligation of simply reporting the data as it is - not as he would like it to be, or as others would expect it to be. The other new 'sciences' - in humanities and social research - have also been forced to adopt the approach of the natural scientists as this is the only way they can achieve progress in their fields. Failure to be completely honest in the mind can lead to regression of civilisation and even disaster at times as people might end up 'knowing' a false thing. The recent war in Iraq was partly started because someone somewhere in the American intelligence system reported the presence of mass destruction weapons in Iraq and passed this information up as fact. Had there been intellectual honesty at every single stage of the system, there would have definitely been no war, at least not as soon as it came.

This rather lengthy preamble was necessary because the Zambian political culture is tending more and more towards intellectual dishonesty, even among our ostensible moralists. Politicians are particularly adept at adopting this dangerous habit as they sell their own agendas to the public. The result, unfortunately, is that we shall go backwards instead of forward as we continue to value the absence of true reality, the rejection of facts for the sake of winning the admiration of the masses. A principled person always rejects the temptation of denying the facts that are clear before his own mind, even if this means losing the support or friendship of other people. In fact, the world has always been changed by people who were never prepared to trade their perception of facts for agreement with tradition or simply to avoid social sequestration. Martin Luther, Charles Darwin, Galileo, Socrates, Jesus Christ, Nelson Mandela, ad infinitum, are all famous examples of people who refused to reject what they truly thought and knew in their minds for the sake of peace or friendship with society or authority. Some of them paid with their lives for their commitment to their own minds, and others lost the respect of their peers for refusing to conform, for refusing to lie. But history remembers them differently.

Let me now get to the point. This past year has seen the rise of a trend that could lead to the distortion of the true facts of Zambia's history as politicians everywhere have found it fashionable to pour endless accolades on our first president, Dr. Kenneth Kaunda. This trend culminated in the establishment of a State-sponsored birthday party - 'birthweek' party, actually - for the eightieth birthday of Dr. Kaunda, something I am not particularly opposed to because I believe he deserves to be honoured as the first president of Zambia and as a great liberation fighter who helped us get independence from British rule. The Chiluba Government was definitely wrong to completely ignore the great contribution of the man in Zambia's history, even going as far as stripping him of his citizenship in a nation he founded. Chiluba's government was not intellectually honest because the facts are that Kaunda did do something important in the history of Zambia by fighting for its independence, and to treat him as a non-Zambian or even as a commoner was simply absurd and dishonest.