by Alec Russell
The Zambian leader was, however, one of the few genuinely likeable Big Men. Although corruption flourished under his chaotic rule, he was untainted. He would burst into tears and dab his eyes with a handkerchief at emotional points in his many public addresses. He had a lightness of touch remarkable for an African leader of his generation. He and his wife Betty once entertained President Nixon at the White House with guitar and song. When South Africa was several nervy months from its April 1994 election I watched him dance a jig on a Johannesburg television talk show while one of his oldest enemies, Roelof 'Pik' Botha, the veteran Afrikaner Nationalist foreign minister, hopped around a giant saucepan cooking his favourite stew. Kaunda's most valued political act, however, came at the very end of his long rule. After nearly three decades in office, he submitted to the voice of his people, a rare event in a continent where few leaders bow out of office.
The hero of that rare African good news story was an outspoken trade unionist, Frederick Chiluba, who rose to power in the mould of the Polish union leader, Lech Walesa, by daring to challenge the one-party state, and calling for reform. His election campaign was irresistible as it focused on one key demand - reform. The clamour for change had been growing steadily in the late Eighties as it became clear to Zambians that independence had been a disaster. With Western aid donors at last acknowledging there should be a reformist price tag to their largesse and threatening to cut off loans, Kaunda was under increasing pressure to change. Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and a loosening of Africa's ideological straitjacket. Like a gambler trying one last routine, K.K. agreed to multi-party elections and, much to his surprise, was voted from power.
On conceding defeat Kaunda regretfully said farewell to the sumptuous grounds of State House, where he had played many a needle golf tournament with visiting dignitaries on his private nine-hole course. One of his former golfing partners recalled to me wistfully that he had never been such a good loser on the course: 'You couldn't take your eye off him or he would be lying about his handicap, changing the lay of his ball in the rough and mismarking his card.' His diminutive successor was a born-again Christian who clearly believed he was on a crusade. Chiluba saw himself as the first in a new breed of African leaders and was determined to prove to the world that Africans really were starting to take responsibility for their own affairs. He shattered the cosy support system of the OAU, which had become little more than an autocrats' drinking club, when he stood up at a plenary session and denounced Africa's dictators. 'In Africa today the era of dictators, of hypocrisy and lies is over .. .' he told a startled audience in Washington a few months after taking power.
More than three years later he repeated the message in South Africa. 'To me democracy is not the preserve of the developed world,' he said. 'Democracy will succeed in Africa. Having broken the back of the one-party dictator and conscientized the people, we believe very sincerely that democracy is here to stay.' But this time his reception was distinctly muted. In a bitter blow to Africans' hopes of a rebirth, the parallel with Walesa, who turned out to be a disastrous president and was eventually voted out of office, proved all too apt.
Chiluba deserved praise in the early days of his presidency for his bravery in grasping the nettle of economic reform. He inherited an economy that had all but ceased to exist after two decades of inefficient statist policies. He promptly did what few African leaders have dared to do before or since: he slashed the old subsidies, curbed government spending and took a scythe to the bloated civil service.
The International Monetary Fund. and the World Bank approved; it was textbook structural adjustment, the harsh reformist medicine that the West prescribed to Africa in the Eighties. But, as was proved time and again, the continent is too frail for such measures. On paper, structural adjustment has all the answers, but it failed to take into account Africa and the Africans and raised the ultimate dilemma of modern Africa - which comes first, economic or political reform? It is arguable that you cannot introduce the one without the other, but democratic leaders risked being overthrown at the ballot box if they imposed the austerity measures necessary for the reforms to work. Few, if any, Western electorates would be able to tolerate a fraction of the hardship required of Africans by structural adjustment. Two of the more successful free-market programmes were introduced by President Museveni of Uganda and Ghana's President Rawlings, authoritarian populists whose records raise a sensitive question: is autocracy the only way forward?
A year after Chiluba took office, consumer goods did at last start to appear on Lusaka's shop-shelves, but Zambians were too poor to buy them. Cafes opened but only the elite could afford their prices. For the peasants even seeds became too expensive. As K.K. lumbered out of unofficial retirement to capitalize on the dissatisfaction, Chiluba resorted to increasingly autocratic measures, arresting opposition journalists and critics. Cabinet members were linked to drug-dealing and corruption. As the cycle of repression looked set to start again, the old joke that democracy in Africa means 'one man, one vote, one time' was once again doing the rounds.
Unsurprisingly the furore delighted Rupiah Banda, a leading figure in Kaunda's United National Independence Party (UNIP). We met in the courtyard of Lusaka's Holiday Inn, where the freshly painted white walls and nimble waiters symbolized the new free-market breeze blowing through a city that had been a byword for shortages and queues. Banda was a jolly bear of a man with a booming laugh and fruity British accent. As we relished chilled South African beers, which had been unavailable in the old days of the UNIP government, Banda happily acknowledged they had botched the past, before he proceeded to belittle Chiluba, in particular for a bizarre constitutional clause designed to stop Kaunda from standing against him.
The government had just proposed that only Zambians could stand for the presidency. This was patently aimed at Kaunda, whose parents had been born in Nyasaland, now Malawi. But instead it prompted an investigation of Chiluba's own past, which, to the delight of UNIP, backfired badly. In a front-page article which sent shockwaves through the government, the Post, Zambia's one truly independent newspaper, researched Chiluba's own background in a village on the Zairean border. He had, the newspaper claimed, been born in Zaire to Zairean parents. As for Chiluba's father, far from his having died, as the president said, the Post produced a Zairean called Luka Chabala who claimed to be the president's father and who insisted that the president had changed his name.
Chiluba was outraged and flatly denied the allegations. Most Zambians were not so sure. It was not that any minded whether the president had been born on this or that side of a particular river. Borders in central Africa are famously fluid and rightly so given the randomness of many of the lines colonial administrators had drawn on the map. The nub of the matter was that Chiluba's armour was less shining than had been thought. After years of taunting K.K. on the need to allow the people to choose, he now seemed reluctant to give the old stalwart another chance.
Elections did finally take place in November 1996 but without Kaunda, who had been barred. The muted and sullen atmosphere was a far cry from the rapturous joy, which accompanied Zambians' previous foray to the polls. Chiluba's image was to sink still further the following year. On Christmas Day 1997 he arrested Kaunda on suspicion of involvement in an abortive coup attempt the previous month. When he was criticized in the West he started denouncing the colonial powers for meddling, just as K.K. had done at sensitive moments. Chiluba's aides later said they had decided to act on Christmas Day assuming the world would be on holiday and so would pay little attention. They could not have been more wrong. It was a quiet Christmas in the rest of the world. Day after day Zambia was on international television after an incident which might have escaped notice at any other time.
I had only a modicum of sympathy for Kaunda as he fulminated about the abuse of the very democratic rights he had denied his people so long. Grand old man of Africa that he is, on his release from prison in 1998 he probably did his people a service by announcing
an end to his political career. But that did not excuse Chiluba, whose behaviour sounded all too familiar to the rest of the continent.
*
So after all these travails is Africa still not yet ready for democracy? Depressingly, Zambia's tale was hardly unique. The people of Blantyre were initially agog with the wonders of their newfound freedom under Banda's successor. When I met Bakili Muluzi at his Sanjika Palace I was impressed. His crisp answers and lack of protocol marked him out as utterly unlike the Big Men. Strikingly he announced he would forgo the chance of hobnobbing with other heads of state at the United Nations Development Conference in Copenhagen. The vast expense of taking his entourage there could, he argued, be better spent in Malawi.
But the 'new man' was less jaunty by the time of my interview with Banda, little more than a year after the election. Malawians' love affair with multi-party politics had long since died. The politicians, everyone muttered, spent more time arguing than governing. The cabinet was over-staffed. There were reports of officials driving convoys of food aid over the border into Mozambique for a quick profit. Newspapers and trade unions seemed to have mistaken freedom for licence. To the delight of the time-servers at the Malawi Congress Party there were even appreciative hankerings after the old days. 'At least you knew where you stood,' I was told time and again by frustrated Malawians. Diplomats mused that Muluzi's new broom was looking like more of the same. He had, it emerged, refused the Copenhagen invitation only after coming under massive pressure from the West to cut costs or risk forfeiting loans.
The refrain was familiar from Eastern Europe where, a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, electorates started hankering for the comfort and security of the old order. In times of hardship, memories are short. But in Eastern Europe democracy did at least have regional and historical foundations. Malawi, like much of Africa, has had to undergo in a matter of decades a political evolution that took centuries in the West. First, the colonists thrust much of the continent into the glare of the developed world. Then, in their haste to decolonize, they abandoned country after country with only the trappings of democratic institutions.
'It was a Catch-22,' a senior British government advisor from the period later mused to me. 'If we had sanctioned anything short of democracy we would have been pilloried. So we put in place the structures of Westminster-style oppositional politics and to no one's surprise it did not work.'
The blunderings and tribulations of Africa's new democrats were endlessly amusing to Banda's aides. He had long argued that multi-party politics were alien to Africa. The African continent, he once declared, needed a special style of democracy and it also needed time. 'Democracy did not come to Britain on the platter from the Angel Gabriel in heaven,' he told his party.
'There are varieties of cow, varieties of sheep and goat, varieties of chicken- so why should there not be varieties of democracy? We have to have our own kind of democracy based on African institutions. (4)
This was, inevitably, a favoured line of crusty old autocrats, but it does contain a kernel of truth. The rights and wrongs of multi-party politics in Africa is one of the more sensitive debates in the continent. By suggesting that Africa is not mature enough for democracy you run the risk of being labelled racist or neo colonialist. But it is unarguable that Western-style multi-party democracy has had a dismal record in Africa. All too often it has split states down tribal lines and led to chaos and war. As frequently it has provided a facade of respectability for the very tyrants outsiders hoped it would supplant. President Moi of Kenya and President Mugabe of Zimbabwe were classic examples. Both were elected in flawed multi-party elections enabling them to vaunt their 'democratic' credentials. But in Zimbabwe being a member of a credible opposition party was a very risky undertaking – particularly post-2000 when Mr Mugabe faced a serious threat to his rule.
Africa's political difficulties, however, are more deeply rooted than just bad leadership. A range of factors has assisted the triumph of tyrants, not least poverty, as Mr Muluzi warned soon after taking office. It was, he said, the greatest barrier to democracy. 'People cannot eat democracy. They cannot eat human rights. All these problems we see in Africa are because people are poor.' Much of Africa has a harsh and unremitting climate which saps the strength of all but the most energetic.
The World Bank estimates that eighteen out of the world's twenty poorest nations are in Africa. With daily life little more than a battle for survival, politics is a luxury that only the wealthy have time for.
For the Big Men it was all too easy to dominate. For Africa watchers the acquiescence of many societies towards their elites is endlessly frustrating. But the abuses of Arab, European and African slavers, followed by colonial rule, have weighed heavily on the continent's psyche, spawning a culture of sub mission which impedes the growth of a vigorous opposition culture. The Big Men's greed and repression merely cemented a feeling that the little man was doomed to be trampled underfoot.
And yet it is a massive mistake to conclude that Africans do not want accountable government. You only have to witness the enthusiasm and patience of Africans lining up to vote at an election to understand people are aching to have a say in running their societies. It is just that they are seldom given the chance to cast a vote, and when they are, all too often the government machinery loads the dice against the opposition.
To understand the political currents that are swirling in late twentieth-century Africa you have to go beyond the utterances of its leaders, and one of the best places to start is the local newsstand. Publications with crisp new paper and shiny print are to be read with caution; their sheen suggests funding from a local bigwig. Instead, often the journals to head for are the ones with yellowy print-smudged paper. It is there that writers can be found criticizing the government, whatever its hue, as they fight to defend or attain a long-dreamed-of freedom.
I learned the lesson of the newspaper stand during my long vigil in Blantyre. It had been an especially frustrating day. I had trekked several times to the office of the government spokesman for pre-arranged appointments only to find an empty desk and the blank stares of civil servants with nothing to do. On a whim I bought a sheaf of newspapers, flagged down a taxi, thrust in the driver's face the Independent, which was at the top of the pile, and asked him to take me there. An hour later I was outside a launderette on the edge of town face to face with David Nthengwe, the newspaper's fresh-faced editor. In time I came to see him as the voice and face of the new Africa.
I arrived at a difficult time. The Independent's last telephone line had been cut off that morning for non-payment. In a bitter twist their last incoming call had been from a chain of garages, the newspaper's main advertiser. The manager was transferring their business to another paper without a day's notice. No reason had been given, but the journalists did not need to be told. The firm had for months been warning that the newspaper was too critical of Mr Muluzi's government. The loss of the advertising meant there would be no salaries that month. It was enough to make the most dedicated newspaperman throw in the towel, but Nthengwe and his young team had not seen off Banda for nothing. There can have been no one older than thirty on the staff. They had already had to cut their weekly production from two editions to one. The sine qua non was their survival.
The Independent was one of dozens of newspapers that emerged in the dying days of Banda's regime. Journalistic training was in as short supply as funding and materials. But determination and energy made up the shortfall. When Banda lost the 1994 election many transferred their attentions to the new government. Tittle-tattle and conspiracy were often dressed up as news, undermining the newspapers' reputations. But it was the principle that mattered. The days of hagiography were over. Just because the 'good guys' had won the election, journalists were not going to stand back and watch another elite take charge - or at least, Nthengwe said with a devil-may-care smile, they would do their best not to.
'We are, I suppose, surviving only by the grace of God,' he ex
plained. 'We take all sides on their merits and so we suffer. We want to be objective. The difficulty is that you have to fight between survival and objectivity. Companies warn unless we tone down our line they will leave us. What can we do? Governments in Africa are only interested in power and money. They are not concerned with freedom of speech. These new leaders are putting on their democracy jacket, but their shirts are cut from the same old dictatorial cloth.'
For journalists like Nthengwe it was difficult enough to get their hands on newsprint and notebooks, let alone a story. But somehow he managed. During his schooldays he had watched as Banda had frittered away his people's hopes, dreamed of wielding a critical pen, and waited for his chance. When the opportunity finally came, at the end of Banda's rule, he vowed not to waste it - and not to compromise his ideals.
He started at the Independent soon after it opened in the dying days of Banda's regime. Within a few months his writing was attracting unwelcome attention. His younger brother Donald was walking home one night when a man ran into his path, thrust a revolver in his face and threatened to blow his head off if he did not reveal where David was staying. Donald denied he had• a brother and the vigilante, almost certainly a member of Banda's Pioneers, ran off into the bush.
Nthengwe became the talk of the town. He was one of Malawi's most prominent journalists in the countdown to the elections. But if Muluzi expected to be supported by him and Banda's other critics, he was sorely disappointed. Once the election was over, the Independent and other papers levelled their sights on the new team. The response was not long in coming. Nthengwe was walking with a friend from the office to his township home a few months after the election when police with automatic rifles ambushed them from behind a tree. Shortly before a gun butt crashed down on his head, he heard one of the policemen exclaim: 'I know this boy. He is the one writing rubbish things against Muluzi.'
