The orchestrated campaign against Brian Mundubile
By Sishuwa Sishuwa
To what would the ruling United Party for No Democracy (UPND) supporters attribute Hichilema’s loss of power next week since, according to them, the president has delivered on his promises and there is no serious opposition to unseat him? I believe that the only path to victory for Hichilema is through industrial scale vote-rigging, but how would his supporters explain or rationalise his electoral defeat?
I listened to Brian Mundubile’s interview with the BBC conducted as part of a set of interviews with the leading presidential candidates in next week’s election. To listen to the full interview, click on the link below:
https://bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/w3ct8n2y
On the whole, I think Mundubile did well, especially for someone who lacks the kind of media training that his main rival, who spent 15 years in opposition, got exposed to during his five failed attempts at the presidency. I particularly liked Mundubile’s point that Zambia is not getting sufficient revenue from the mining industry especially now when copper prices are very high. “We need to sit down with the mining houses. We need to get a fair return”, he said. This is a very important issue for me, one that I first discussed in detail in 2019.
I look forward to listening to Hichilema’s interview tomorrow.
I see UPND supporters, consisting of praise singers and Zambezi supremacists, having a field day about “how bad the interview was” but none of them is explaining what exactly he said that was problematic and why and what should have been the correct response and why. It as if they simply wanted him to blame other people by insisting that he was not Edgar Lungu or a key decision maker in the previous administration but just a mere provincial minister with limited power, the same way that Hichilema refuses to take responsibility for anything wrong and blames those before him!
I do not support Mundubile or any candidate in this election. However , I cannot help noticing the campaign to malign the man and twist everything he says. I mean everything. They are even blaming him for calling for public donations when Hichilema did the same. After realising that Hichilema also did the same, they now say he has done it too late. That he is a bad planner! It is hilarious.
It is as if the ruling party and its supporters have nothing to sell to the people, except lies and false narratives. We live in a world without “concrete reality” and one that is instead dominated by narratives – lies cooked by politicians in power and transmitted to the innocent public by their missionaries in co-opted or captured media outlets. Winning the war of “narratives” is what counts, not knowing reality for what it is. The extreme form of this media warfare is manufacturing “fakes news” and labelling the truth as “fakes news”.
I repeat. Mundubile has so many domestic and foreign forces working against him in this election that it is extraordinary that he has made it a competitive contest.
He has had to run on a little known political party ticket because his main rival abused state institutions to prevent him from running on a more familiar brand name by instigating divisions in all parties that were perceived as capable of serving as possible vehicles or platforms for his presidential campaign.
He cannot leave Zambia to mobilise funds outside the country because the state grabbed his passport alongside his phones in March this year after blocking him from leaving the country at the airport before arresting him on a cyber-related offence.
He can hardly mobilise funds within the country because the state has squeezed local businesses perceived as supporting him.
He has had to use the road for campaigning across 116 districts and 10 provinces in less than 60 days while his rival flies at will from one public rally to another because the state has denied the opposition leader permission to use the airspace for campaign activities. A known private charter company that should have flown him around the country and approached the authorities on his behalf was not cleared to serve him, forcing the opposition leader to undertake all his campaigns using road travel.
He has had to rely on a shoestring budget for his campaign, which includes donations from struggling citizens, against a wealthy incumbent President whose well-oiled campaign has benefited from the use of state resources and the generous support of multinational corporations and a major European mission in Lusaka that is working closely with State House to conduct opinion polls aimed at identifying potential areas of improvement.
On 27 July, this mission, whose government and private actors are eyeing significant mineral deposits from the recently completed nationwide mineral survey that was carried out in cohort with its agents, released its latest poll report that recommended that Hichilema must return to specific rural constituencies where he had already concluded his campaign so that he could emphasise the issues that it identified as of particular importance to rural voters: free education, social cash transfer, and school feeding programs.
He is completely blacked out of coverage by the public public and has much of the private media arraigned against him, in addition to being crowded out of the latter by both financially rewarding ads from his main rival and ruling party officials.
He has had to contend with the regular arrest of his campaign officials and even parliamentary candidates as well as high-level defections of his party functionaries to the ruling party following extremely attractive financial inducements.
And much, much else. I cannot believe the lack of international interest in such a gross disregard of democratic rights.
The only thing that Mundubile has had on his side since the start of the campaign is the organic support of the people. I encourage people to turn up and vote en masse. A vicious and undemocratic president like Hichilema deserves to be rejected with a big margin that would make it difficult to manipulate the vote. The government is the people!
To reiterate, I do not support Mundubile and have not endorsed anyone in this election. Should Mundubile emerge victorious, I will do to his presidency what I have been doing to the current president and what I did to the presidencies of Rupiah Banda, Michael Sata, and Edgar Lungu: holding the leadership to account.
I promise to fight the Mundubile team should they fail to reflect adequate ethnic diversity in public appointments, to create a professional civil service, to restore our cherished democracy, and to decisively fight corruption beyond rhetoric. The latter includes the need to launch an independent investigation into the activities of First Quantum Minerals and the influence of other private actors such as Chatham House, Greg Mills, and a host of local private businesses people on policy decisions especially those related to energy and mining, made over the last five years. Those found wanting, that is the private actors and their official enablers, should be made to pay for their crimes against the Zambian people.
One of the most disappointing things about the Hichilema presidency has been the extent to which he allowed foreign actors to dictate policy direction in many respects. I do not know if this was a result of inferiority complex on the president’s part, which these private actors took advantage of, or it was because Hichilema was all along simply a front of even bigger kleptocrats.
Whatever the case, I am tired of seeing what Prof Grieve Chelwa, that patriot and outstanding son of Zambia, once called “small boys and girls” from Europe and North America having a field day over our lives at State House, at the Ministry of Finance, and in the civil service more generally. As Thabo Mbeki once observed, “We must free ourselves of the ‘friends’ who populate our ranks, originating from the world of the rich, who come to us, perhaps dressed in jeans and T-shirts, as advisers and consultants, while we end up as the voice that gives popular legitimacy to decisions we neither made, nor intended to make, which our ‘friends’ made for us, taking advantage of an admission that perhaps we are not sufficiently educated.”
Source: https://x.com/ssishuwa/status/2084577860996436313?s=20
