Before we begin our analysis, let’s first begin by pledging to be totally realistic in our dissection of this very important issue. And the first realistic point we must accept is this: the next president of Zambia will more than likely be the person who will be picked to be the presidential candidate of the current ruling Movement for Multi-party Democracy (MMD).

I know many people wish things were different, but it is just a fact that the MMD is still the strongest party in the nation and it will continue taking advantage of its rural influence to keep winning elections for a long time to come. It is very difficult for the other parties to organize themselves in the rural areas, but for the ruling party it is easy because the party members simply take advantage of government programs in those areas and ask the electorate, “we have brought a hospital and a school to you, what have the other parties done for you?” I know, this is a wrong question to ask, but it is the question that is asked anyway, and the poor rural dwellers feel they have no choice but to show some appreciation for what “the party” has done (they are still used to Kaunda’s concept of “the party and its government” and it takes very little government investment to impress them since they are so poor). The urban electorate is a little more difficult to impress: they know about taxes, they know about petrol prices, they complain about foreign investors, electricity tariffs, and so on. And yet there are more voters in rural Zambia than urban Zambia.

So, whether you like it or not, the next president is almost certainly the person that will stand on the MMD ticket.

But there is a small problem with the ruling MMD: they do not have anyone to put up. What we know in Zambia is that the next president can not be someone who is not very well-known as “presidential material” at least five years before the elections. Kaunda did not come from nowhere; Chiluba did not come from nowhere; and Mwanawasa did not come from nowhere. These were all known to be presidential material way before they were called on to run for presidency. The second realistic point we have to accept, therefore, is simply that there is no visible presidential material person in the MMD leadership and therefore, the candidate will not come from their current leaders.

Now, there could actually even be some people within the MMD who have these presidential leadership qualities, but the problem is that most people are usually so scared of displaying such a personality that in the end no one notices any leadership qualities in them. They are afraid of making the president feel like they want to challenge him, so they just humble themselves like the worms in the dust and sell their souls by becoming happy bootlickers. The president ends up not respecting them enough to ever think of “anointing” them as his successor. This is always the pattern.

Had Michael Sata been as confident and independent when he was in Chiluba’s government as he has become outside government, Chiluba would have considered him for the presidency. But Mr. Sata was always singing songs for Chiluba, always jumping before he even coughed, always worshipping the man and never ever challenging him. Whatever Chiluba thought and said, it was Sata who amplified it, whether it made sense or not. Chiluba obviously loved such people but he did not respect them enough to entrust them with power. He believed that such a high position deserved to be occupied by a man who was as strong-willed and independent as himself.

You can easily see this from the people he chose as his vice-president; they were always the type who were “their own man” in many ways. His first vice-president, Levy Mwanawasa, was so independent that he differed with his boss as early as the first two years, and he even ended up resigning. The next person Chiluba appointed as vice-president was also a very independent, strong willed non-bootlicker: General Godfrey Miyanda. This is a man who was so strong-willed and independent-minded that he had even been accused of trying to overthrow Kaunda’s government in an attempted coup d’etat.

When you choose to be respected instead of choosing to be loved, the risk you carry is that you can be fired any time, if you do not resign on your own; in short, you have an uncertain political career. The psychology, I think is this: a president like Chiluba will choose a person who he sees as independent and strong-willed as vice-president because he wants to bring that person’s spirit under him. Everyone expects a vice-president to be totally submissive to the president, and to become virtually invisible. So, Chiluba chose these strong personalities as a personal challenge: he wanted to see them broken and submissive to him. He could never choose someone like Michael Sata or Katele Kalumba, and others, as vice-president because these were already his “boys”.

Now, because these people are very strong personalities, it would be difficult to completely break them and the president would simply fire them if they continued being so stubborn, independent, and strong-willed. General Miyanda was therefore fired by Chiluba for very unexplainable reasons and he replaced him with another strong man: General Christon Tembo, a man who had also been convicted of trying to overthrow the previous president. Naturally, General Tembo was also later fired for his insubordination!

General Tembo was so independent that even as Vice-President, he organised a group of party and government leaders to oppose the third term bid of his boss, President Chiluba. You never expect that from your vice-president, but that’s what happens when you choose such a personality to be your vice-president.

Even after General Tembo, Chiluba still chose a confident, rebellious man who had never been known for bootlicking. Enoch Kavindele is so independent that he even holds the record of being the only one who had dared to openly challenge Kenneth Kaunda at the height of his power for the presidency of the United National Independence Party. Such a man is the one Chiluba chose as his last vice-president!

There was no time to fire Kavindele because it was now nearly election time: Chiluba’s successor would be the one who would do the honours. After proudly and gladly inheriting Kavindele as his own vice-president, it did not take too long before Mwanawasa decided to fire this strong-willed personality, and, continuing in the tradition of Chiluba, he replaced him with another strong-willed personality in the name of Nevers Mumba, a man who had previously been so “rebellious” that he was among the first people in Zambia to start an opposition movement against Chiluba’s MMD at a time when most people were afraid of even writing letters against the government in the newspapers without using a false name! Mwanawasa fired Mumba very quickly after his appointment!

Mwanawasa then decided to stop this tradition and begun a new tradition of just playing it safe: he replaced Mumba with an invisible man (I’ve forgotten his name) and after this man lost his own parliamentary election, he also replaced him with another invisible man, both of whom were almost completely unknown to the public before their appointments. It is unlikely that Mwanawasa will fire his new vice-president just as it was impossible for him to fire the previous one (oh yes, his name was Lupando Mwape).

Now, I should just make another note on Mwanawasa’s appointment as the MMD presidential candidate in 2001. True to tradition, Chiluba could not choose the people in the MMD that were too submissive to him. At the time, he probably even felt he had conquered Kavindele and he was therefore also not worth succeeding him; in short, Vice-president Kavindele was still very submissive to the president at the time they started choosing the candidate, being still thankful for his appointment. Predictably, Chiluba had to look outside the active leadership of the MMD and decided to bring in a man that he had failed to conquer: his former vice-president, Levy Mwanawasa. He felt he was the only one worthy of replacing him from such a high office.

What happens is that even when a strong personality like Chiluba differs with such strong personalities, he still secretly maintains his respect for them because he knows he failed to conquer them. In fact, when people were accusing Chiluba of choosing Mwanawasa so that he could be his puppet, Chiluba replied at a rally, “those who are saying we have chosen a puppet do not know Mwanawasa: this man is truly his own man; no one can control him.” Chiluba knew what he was talking about from his own experience, although he did not expect his successor would go as far as hunting him down for his own corruption acts!

And now Mr. Levy Patrick Mwanawasa has a problem: there is no one among his leaders in the MMD that has the kind of personality that he himself has, the rebel type, the independent, strong-willed type: the presidential type. They’ve all chosen to be loved by him rather than to be respected by him as the former is less risky. They’ve all chosen quiet, submissive lives that attract no attention rather than the risky life of being “your own man”. They have made themselves worthy of being his good friends, but not worthy of succeeding him.

So, since the president is very influential in choosing his successor, my bet is that the presidential candidate of the MMD will come from outside the party: Mwanawasa, like Chiluba before him, will choose a person that he respects, even if it is someone he does not truly “love”.

The trickiest part, though, is that this person has to be acceptable to the party. It has to be someone with whom they will generally have no problem leading them as a party; someone they can easily accept as their own, even if he comes from outside.

One of the best choices of presidential candidate for the MMD at the moment is a man that both the general public and the president know to be “his own man”: Brigadier-General Godfrey Miyanda.

End of part 1.

To be continued …