The recent judgment of Judge Smith in the London High Court against Zambia's second president for the money he stole from the public during his tenure of office has become the centre of discussions in Zambia and the rest of Africa. Chiluba added fire to the whole controversy by giving his own comments about the judgment, accusing the Judge of many sins.

Firstly, Chiluba brought up the imperialist nonsense. The man has really gone back to his true Marxist self of his trade unionist days (after his brief stint with capitalism in the first few years of office), with the usual melodramatic imaginations of an intricate conspiracy among "racist Western powers" ganged up against him. Just the other month, he was publicly defending another "re-awoken" Marxist revolutionary, Robert Mugabe, who also preaches the same useless anti-imperialist "struggle," like our young, ignorant students do before they learn to think.

Well, this is what I find funny about our African "anti-imperialist" Marxist revolutionaries: when it suits them, they preach against the West, but when they want to buy suits, they always go West! And that's not just a quip. Chiluba literally bought a million dollars' worth of tailor-made suits and shoes from "the evil West", perhaps because he trusts their quality so much; but apparently he doesn't trust their quality when it comes to adjudicating his court cases. There, he wants to be patriotic (I wonder why he could not patriotically spend that 1 million dollars on a local fabrics company; just a single order from him would have revived the clothing industry!)

But let me get to the actual "defence" he put up (after the judgment was over). According to Chiluba, the money from the Zamtrop account that he was using for himself came from personal gifts from other people and not from taxpayers' money. Well, if this was the case, the man was still very, very immoral to accept such gifts. He knew very well that one of the problems we all had was that we thought that government leaders were being bribed by corrupt people. So, it was important for the man to be totally transparent and avoid receiving any personal gifts that can not be fully disclosed to the public. How would we know, for example, if some of those gifts did not come from foreign investors who wanted to get special tax incentives from government, or to buy the mines cheaply on the Copperbelt? Or from people who imported cobalt cheaply from Zambia? How do we know they did not come from other dictators who wanted Chiluba's vote at the UN General Assembly or something? How do we know some of the money did not come from wealthy convicted criminals who wanted a presidential pardon, or a deportation order reversed?

The point is why would people give so much personal money to Chiluba, so many millions of dollars, if not to bribe him? The man was not poor by any standards and he had everything paid for by government, so why would people feel so sorry for him that they would send him so much money personally? If they wanted to support his party, there was an account for the party. What is it that they wanted to gain from him by giving him those huge gifts personally and not to his party, and not even to his government? A prima facie case of corruption is reasonably established by this public confession from the horse's mouth itself.

Imagine what would happen if George Bush or Tony Blair had a secret account where people could send them personal money that can not be traced or disclosed "for security reasons". So many people would send them money to get their favours. Even Saddam Hussein would have given George Bush a small gift of 1 billion dollars so that he could reconsider bombing him, and all those multimillionaires in jail for Enron-type and Martha-Stewart-type scandals would have sent millions of dollars to the president, knowing the public would never know about it. The gifts-for-honours scandal that president Chiluba referred to in his press conference, to charge that Tony Blair had no moral authority to condemn him, did not in fact involve any personal gifts to Tony Blair. That's a very huge difference and the two cases can not even be compared at all on a moral level; Chiluba knows this, but he also believes that the Zambian public have too little intelligence to discern the essential distinction.

Leaders in developed nations are forced by law to disclose everything they ever receive, and in fact, they can not even receive gifts to that level. Conveniently, Chiluba did not put up any law to limit what the president could receive, and further, he and his friends found a loophole in the system that allowed him to receive large amounts of cash without accounting for them and without disclosing the senders or their purpose. A very simple sense of morality and integrity would have made him simply refuse such gifts, and to even set up a law that would prevent any future leader from receiving any personal gifts.

There have been confirmed stories in the press of president Mwanawasa withdrawing huge amounts of money from his personal account and so on. Now, it's possible that president Mwanawasa has also received some gifts from some well wishers, etc. I don't know. It could be this or it could be money he made from his farm or his firm. If it is the case of money coming from well-wishers, I would strongly advise the president to reject such monies, and further, to put a law against it for future presidents to abide by.

Of course Mr. Mwanawasa is an honest person who would not receive money from a convict that wants to be pardoned, from a foreign investor that wants special tax incentives or to get some law changed in their favour, and so on. But for the sake of transparency, he should just never receive any personal gifts from anyone, whether this is through his personal account or through the Zamtrop account; whether it is publicly disclosed or hidden from the public. That should be the law, but he can practice the principle even before it is made into law, for his own sake.

I would go further by advising that the good First Lady must also be careful about her charity foundation. There are so many corrupt people in this world (not just in Zambia) who would want to gain special favour or special consideration from the president that they would use any avenue to influence him. By giving gifts to the First Lady's foundation, they might want to win the heart of the first lady, and they know just how much influence she has on the president (as the president himself has admitted). They know they can get themselves on parastatal boards, appointed to the enviable foreign missions, or granted other special incentives if the first lady just mentioned their generosity to her good husband.

In order to close all loopholes for such unnecessary suspicion which can come to haunt them in the end, I advise that the first family make immediate steps to close all these potential channels of corruption. The president will demonstrate his own seriousness by bringing a law that will prevent a president from receiving any special gifts from anyone, and this law could extend to the first lady. It could be made illegal for future first ladies to own such charity foundations, or if they have to (I don't think they have to), it could be funded by the government. This law could also ban the first lady from distributing any gifts around the country during elections or by-elections. In fact, the best would be to limit her to have a small, single stationary organization that does not go out to distribute things to all parts of the country, but simply stays in one place, if the idea is to give her something to do (as the first lady herself once said); thus she could have an orphanage or a legal aid service to women or something, and its size (financially) could reasonably be limited by law, and answerable to the auditor general. The details can be worked out by the experts, but the goal is simply to destroy any channel that corrupt people can use to try to gain special treatment from the president.

Anyway, the bottom line is that unlike our other two presidents, Chiluba is guilty of at least failing to uphold the honour of the presidency, which he swore to do, by using shady channels to receive personal monetary gifts for himself. An honourable president can not come out richer after his term of office through "personal gifts"; that is clearly a criminal case of corruption by any jurisdiction.