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In the continuation of the series, Kenneth Kaunda talks to Andrew M. Mwenda about his successes and failures during his reign as president
I want to admit that as a human being, I must have made some mistakes.
I know I am an ordinary human being subject to doing good and bad. There is no way I can stand on a rooftop like this one of yours and say, I did no wrong. That would not be correct at all. I made so many mistakes as a human being.
I may not remember all of them. I am sure there are quite many but it’s human to error. However, I also know that Africa’s tragedy is not just a product of mistakes by Africa leaders alone.
There is a lot of harm from the powerful countries and from institutions like the IMF and World Bank.
They tend to contribute to the poverty and misery we see in Africa today.
Some people think I stayed in power for so long. To be honest, I am not yet sure whether that was a mistake on my part or not.
Some think I should have left power early enough so that I would not suffer electoral defeat, just like my friend and brother Julius Nyerere in Tanzania did.
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| I DID MY PART: Kaunda says his biggest achievement was uniting Zambia (Monitor photo) |
I am not yet certain of my own feelings. I think it is not the time someone stays in office that should be the issue but what a leader does when he is in such a position of responsibility.
It was a Friday when they announced that Movement for Multi Party Democracy led by Frederick Chiluba had won the elections.
I had my doubts but it didn’t matter. I telephoned Mr Chiluba the president elect and said, “Congratulations. I am told you have won. I am waiting for you tomorrow to come and take over. He said thank you.
The following day, Chiluba came with his whole cabinet, and the Vice President now President Levy Mwanawasa. They were three hours late.
I said, “Young people, I am taking president elect Chiluba to my office to brief him on how I run the state machinery. Please wait here”.
I took him to my office. I briefed him verbally and in writing.
After that, I showed him a secret entrance to tunnels, security tunnels leading to an underground bunker. I told him that if he should ever get into trouble, there is a young man here who will come and declare avacadabra and the tunnels will open.
“And get 29 people you trust and yourself make the thirtieth. There are 30 mattresses, blankets and everything ready. There is a powerful broadcasting machine, more powerful than the state radio, so you can broadcast to the people of Zambia. You can also call for support from somewhere outside. They will come and help you.
I took him around and finally told him “I am a patriot, I am a Pan-Africanist. If at anytime you should need my assistance don’t hesitate to call, I will come and assist.”
Chiluba’s response was a lesson to me about the role of individuals in the destiny of nations, especially so in Africa. Because later on, he called journalists and claimed that I had an underground station where I was locking up opposition leaders, torturing and killing people.
The Post newspaper bought his lie. But some of the press said it looked like a palace and not a dungeon where they were killing people.
Tragedies like this cannot happen when you have got correct leadership. In Africa there must be clean thinking. We should not make politics a source of enmity.
Politics must be a service to the people of God, God’s children. Leaders must look at politics as a service to the nations. If you look at politics as something you must benefit from and power as something you must hold at all costs, then the nation is dead.
Later Chiluba would raid my house claiming I had stolen books from State House. And how many books did he recover? Only four.
Kaunda, the father of the Zambian nation stealing four textbooks! My God!
I was never corrupt as a leader. Up to the day I left office, I did not even have a house in which to live in Lusaka. I had a house in my home village, which is far away from here. So when I left office, I had no house, or where to go.
We had built rest houses here for the mines. I occupied the smallest house belonging to Lwasha mine with my wife. But within 10 days, President Chiluba asked me to vacate the house. The constitution provided that a retired president should have a house, a pension and some support staff. But they abolished all those.
Fortunately, a young man who was working with me had a spare house in Lusaka and he heard that I was being chased from the government house, because these mines were under government control.
He said “Old man please, I have got a house here, you can stay there for two years without paying anything, you have done so much.”
So he lent it to us for two years, my wife, and me and that’s how we survived otherwise we would have been completely destroyed. After two years, another young man who was a businessman came to see me and said he had a big house in Lusaka which he was selling.
At that time on 4 March, 1994, Vice President Mwanawasa, came to see me and said the government had now decided to get me a house and they were going to give me an allowance but not as the constitution had provided.
It was their own decision and it was far, far, little. I had no money at all. I only had 2 million Kwacha in the bank. All this time I was surviving by the grace of God.
Chiluba spread a rumour that I had stolen US$6 billion and they used that as a campaign slogan. After the end of the election, they began to believe their own lies. So they wanted to find out where I had hidden the money.
They asked Scotland Yard to send six specialists. These specialists came here from 2 January 1992 – 30 June 1992. They looked everywhere: here and overseas and they found nothing. My name was clean then; my name is clean today. I move anywhere I can as a free man.
They tried to ban me. They said I was not a Zambian because they were afraid of my coming back to politics in 1996.
They were afraid that I would win elections. They changed the constitution and said that those whose parents came from outside Zambia should not be allowed to stand for elections. My parents had come to Zambia from Malawi.
They passed that through parliament because the one mistake I made was to accept United National Independence Party (UNIP) central committee saying they would not participate in the parliamentary elections of 1996 because I had been barred from standing.
So they had no opposition to speak of. They made a terrible loss.
On civil wars
Africa has been plagued by civil wars. Western observers claim this is a sign of dysfunction of states in Africa. That is incorrect.
The African states you see today have new actors on the international scene and on the domestic scene. You cannot expect stability on the whole continent of Africa after only four decades of independence. Zambia today is 40 years old, and the oldest state in Africa is Ghana, which is 50 years.
Even in Europe, there has been instability for many decades and it is just now that they are re-organising themselves.
So while it is true and right that we should be critical, we should still remember to look at what the causes of these conflicts are, especially ethnicity in Africa. When we got independence, our cry was “One Zambia One Nation.” It helped us; even now the new government has started shouting “One Zambia,” and people respond “One nation”. That kept us strong together, as a people.
We looked at our selves as Africans with a hope that one day we would come to see one Africa, one nation. America is a big place but it is one nation.
God has guided me through my years as a leader. From the beginning of my political career, I have been influenced by two commandments. One, love God your creator with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind with all your strength.
The Lord is teaching us how to relate with Him as our creator and then He says that that is not enough. Remember to love your neighbour as you love your self. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. These have been my guidelines in all my thoughts, in all my deeds.
I want to believe that I was not alone in this. A good number of my colleagues believed in it as well, that is how we worked together as a team.
So I am saying, regardless of what we are, God says your neighbour is not the same tribe as you; is not the same colour as you, not even the same religion as you, Muslim, Christian, Hindu etc. All of us are God’s children.
If you believe in these things strongly; you are bound to contribute something useful. I am not saying African countries should become more Christian than Muslim or anything. If you mention Somalia, all of it is Muslim. They haven’t done it.
When President Bashir of Sudan invited me recently for the trade union conference in Khartoum. I went and sang my favourite song “Step by step, step by step, I will follow Jesus, every day, all my life, keeping step with Jesus.”
But I realised at that Conference there were Muslims, so I sang, “Step by step, step by step, I will follow Mohammed every day of my life keeping step with Mohammed. Why did I do that? Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. That is the commandment I was following.
I realised that there were not only Christians there. There were Muslims also. And therefore in singing about my Christ, I must remember they have their Prophet Mohammed.
The Kenneth Kaunda Foundation for Peace and Democracy was founded to promote conflict resolution in Africa, although the scourge of HIV/Aids has taken more of its time now. Otherwise from the beginning it was the peace foundation, which was more pronounced, but I haven’t done much work in that direction.
You may recall that during the 1970s, there was a conflict between Kenya and Somalia. Kenya invited me and my reply was that I could only come if both sides accepted my mediation.
During the talks, Mzee Jomo Kenyatta was using a Swahili word which I cannot remember now but which was annoying the President of Somalia, Gen Siad Barre, and they almost walked out.
So I said, “Mzee, I have love and respect for you, for what you have done for Africa, but give me the opportunity to rebuke you for what you are doing now, because I will never have the chance. But this time I have the chance to rebuke you because of what you are saying.”
Everybody laughed. Kenyatta, too laughed and said, “Ha-ha, alright Kaunda, I understand.”
When I was chairman of Frontline States of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) in the struggle for the liberation of states in southern Africa, it gave me the opportunity to meet even Boers – the Afrikaners.
I met Foster, the president of apartheid South Africa. I wrote him some letters in 1969 talking about the need for a peaceful dissolution of the apartheid state.
So he wrote back to me believing that he could use those letters to try and confuse the situation. He made a public statement that he was going to reveal me for being the double dealer I was.
That is Foster. What he did not know is that I was working together with my colleagues in Mulungushi Club. For every letter I wrote, I sent copies to Julius Nyerere and Milton Obote.
So the moment Foster made the statement that he was going to reveal me to the world as a double dealer, Julius telephoned me and said, “Ken please just reveal those letters, copy those letters to the public, that is what you need to do.”
I said Julius thank you. Milton also called me and said, “Publicise the letters so that he knows that you have nothing to hide.”
Mulungushi club was actually a club bringing together the leaders of three ruling political parties in Uganda, Tanzania and Zambia – that is the Uganda Peoples’ Congress (UPC), Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) and the United National Independence Party (UNIP), plus the African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa, which was not in power but was in exile led by Oliver Tambo who used to attend all our meetings.
I was in a meeting with my colleagues and I said I was going to do just that. And we published those letters and so the threat of that man came to nothing because I stood for the truth and in meeting them I was trying to make peace between black and white, between them and us.
That is what is important. It is to stand for what is right, what the truth is in every situation. Because we continued to do that, we succeeded in the end.
I think what Africa has been doing is right. There have been so many mistakes made but remember we can’t keep being right all the time. We are human beings.
When I look back at my administration I see that our biggest achievement was to unite Zambia: one Zambia and one nation.
Secondly we had policies which if we had been allowed to continue, would have made Zambia a much better place than it is today.
The fight I was privileged by Zambians to lead was not only fighting for independence and helping our brothers and sisters to fight for independence in other states in southern Africa, but also the fight for economic independence. And we did not borrow anything from anyone from the beginning of time until 1973.
When we came into office, we found only 100 university graduates. Of these only three were medical doctors.
My colleagues and I sat down and planned various development plans and we built primary schools, secondary schools, colleges, and two universities.
In the health field, we built dispensaries, clinics general hospitals, ending up with university teaching hospitals.
We began building in terms of communication, tarmac roads to provinces, and tarmac roads from provinces to the districts.
We achieved a lot and by the time we were leaving government, in 1991, we left over 35,000 university graduates both locally produced and some we sent all over the world.
In those days of East-West confrontation, we didn’t choose. We sent them to the East; we sent them to the West. They came back fully educated and ready to contribute to the nation.
We did all this to try and prepare ourselves for a strong economic situation to consolidate our independence. Recently, someone was complaining in the press that in 1970 Zambia was much better than today. He was complaining about what has happened to the things we built.
Tomorrow, Kaunda talks about his role in the anti HIV-Aids compaign in Zambia and Africa. | 
