The virtue we lost: Why politics must be more than winning
By Dr Cleopas Sambo
THERE is a particular kind of politician we have become accustomed to, or even learned to admire. Watch them in any capital—Lusaka, London, Lilongwe, Washington—and you will recognise the type. They know how to manoeuvre. They know when to bend a rule, when to borrow noble language for strategic ends, and how to reward loyalty while punishing dissent with just enough deniability to avoid scandal. They understand the choreography of power. They know how to appear principled while acting instrumentally, how to enrich themselves without fully breaking the machinery they rely on, how to stretch institutions without quite shattering them. We call them savvy. We call them pragmatic. We call them politically intelligent. Aziba politics uja we say or better still, ‘ana chenjela manje!’
But we are praising the wrong craft.
In Zambia, we have now become very familiar with this logic. Regime after regime presents constitutional reform as a necessary step toward inclusion, while quietly entrenching their own hold on state power. The odd thing is that the language is always persuasive, skillfully appropriating social suffering. ‘These reforms deepen democracy; they amplify marginalised voices; they strengthen participation—of women, people living with disability, young people. Yet the effect is often the opposite, a narrowing of political contestation, recalibrating them completely so that those who govern today find it increasingly difficult to be removed tomorrow.
We have also learned that the machinery of governance rarely shifts by outright seizure. More often, it is repurposed. Procurement flows more readily to the loyal – the ones writing and saying good things in public media about the ‘gavument’ of the day. Investigations begin when a former ally becomes a critic and conclude once the message has been received—or, depending on the moment, investigations begin with critics and subside when critics join the ‘ruling parte’ – a chinja team ukolewe approach to national governance.
In this country , we have seen civil servants learn, without formal instruction, which way the wind blows and how to comply in advance. Serving the government of the day is offered as a euphemism for neutrality, when it is in fact about serving the ‘parte of the day’. Neutrality, we are told, is a risk. And so we hear it repeated, sometimes with a smile and sometimes with a shrug, as though loyalty to office were simply loyalty to order.
When these practices are questioned, the defence arrives quickly, is sharp cutting and in an all too familiar register: you have to understand, this is what it takes to govern. This is political intelligence. Politics—te ya bana—as we have come to argue in Zambia, without a care.
To be fair, I have heard even the enlightened repeat the line – friends, the educated, political and governance experts, lawyers, pastors and even those who claim to be scholars of political science. You sometimes wonder whether while studying the the science of politics we have completely ignored its philosophy. For the Christian nation that we are, we are the perfect embodiment of the warning in 2 Timothy chapter 3 and verse 5—having a form of Godliness but denying its power. We scream democracy but deny its principles!
Still, it is worth pausing over these claims.
What is described as political intelligence is not intelligence at all. It is, in fact, the substitution of manoeuvre for purpose, and the displacement of politics by something that borrows politics’ language while abandoning its substance. While those who claim to be ‘enlightened’ among us frame this as realism, it is not difficult to see that realism without principle is in fact not realism at all but a practical cynicism with a well-rehearsed vocabulary. And, we must always remember that a political order sustained through manipulation does not remain stable indefinitely. In time, it collapses, burying its owners under its rubble.
Politics, properly understood, is not a technique for securing advantage. It is the collective enterprise through which a society governs itself, distributes burdens and benefits, and resolves conflict without collapse. It is how we answer, in practice rather than abstraction, the fundamental questions of shared life: how we live together, how we treat one another, and how we organise power so that it serves rather than dominates.
Competition will always exist and politics is contestatory by nature. There will always be winners and losers. Yet competition without limits corrodes the arena in which it takes place. A system in which rules can be bent whenever bending is advantageous does not remain competitive for long. It becomes predictable and closed. For Zambia at this appoint, in my view, the important question is not whether we compete but whether we preserve the conditions that make competition meaningful.
However, in my analysis, over time, what has changed is not merely the behaviour of political actors. It is the standard by which we judge them. Like frogs in slow boiling pots, slowly boiling to their death, we have learned to admire the leader who knows which principles to suspend, which rules to stretch, and which opponents to neutralise—so long as it is done without appearing to do so and it is done to people we do not agree with or like. We reward the capacity to operate at the edge of what is permissible, to keep the appearance of legality while eroding its substance. Praise the ability to find the right civil society persons to cheer lead loopsided governance logics. We call this sophistication. Instead of shouting ‘chikali ichi,’ when we see such things, we should recognise these acts, for what they commonly are: greed – comingled, with cowardice and corruption but disguised as pragmatism.
The consequences of such a political culture are not theoretical though even if that is what we tend to believe. They are lived. They show up in the quality of the schools that we build, the availability of hospitals and the quality of care they provide, the safety of our streets, the indignity of our labour, and the credibility of courts and the decisions they make. When we reduce our politics to manoeuvre, we defer and displace our problems and until they are eventually handled in ways that privilege position over need. But then, a politics organised around advantage can produce electoral and reputational victories, and not wellbeing outcomes. It accumulates power without translating such power into improvements in the general human condition.
Unfortunately, this logic is not only here in Zambia. We are told—often with the tone of weary realism—that great powers must be judged by different standards, that alliances require silence, that consistency is a luxury in a world governed by interests. Watch closely and the pattern becomes familiar. When a powerful state acts in ways that would provoke outrage if undertaken by another, the language changes. We discover nuance. We invoke complexity. We are reminded that geopolitics is complicated. Consider the way lawfulness is sometimes treated in international disputes. The question becomes less about what is right and more about who has the authority to declare it. Suddenly, we must pay attention to context. This inconsistency reflects a deeper accommodation—an arrangement in which principle yields to position. Sadly, over time, a particular understanding of politics takes hold. Political intelligence becomes the ability to navigate asymmetries—to know which rules apply to whom, and when they can be relaxed. The tactician thrives. The principled actor is recast as naive.
While some continue to praise these behaviours as political maturity, seeking to associate themselves with leaders of this tradition, we must also remember that the human spirit is stubborn and a political order sustained through manipulation does not remain stable indefinitely. Citizens are not endlessly persuadable. They eventually recognise when they are treated as obstacles to be managed rather than participants in a shared project. The tragedy, in my view, is that this condition is not only imposed from above. It is reproduced by the expectations we share. We reward winners, regardless of how they win. We lower our standards, and then we call the lowered standard “progress.”
What would it mean to recover something different?
It would mean leaders willing to accept the risk of losing rather than securing victory through the quiet erosion of the rules.
Mwanawasa inspite his weaknesses walked away when corruption became too much. Today, we declare unending loyalty to the parte. And when that party turns against us sometime in the future – we will, in performative inocence, claim not to have known what our party was capable of.
Changing this culture would mean changing who we are. It would mean opposition that holds government to account not as a prelude to reversal, but as a commitment to a functioning polity. It would mean a civil service that understands its obligation is to the public, not to the shifting occupants of office. It would mean citizens who refuse to be impressed by manoeuvre and instead demand integrity—the harder virtue.
We can ask for something more difficult than agility. We can demand leaders who understand that political intelligence is not the ability to move around rules, but the judgement to know which rules must never be moved.
We have mistaken skill for virtue. We have mistaken success for legitimacy. And in doing so, we have lowered the standard of what politics is for. That standard can be raised again—only if we withdraw admiration from those who have mastered the art of manoeuvre, and extend it to those prepared to govern within limits. Politics can be more than this. It must be more than this. The human condition—and our condition—depends on it. But I know there are some who will read this and sneer: aba nabo!
