Dalitso Mvula

Rationalist, clinician, and social scientist (TB) playing an informed role in the struggle for economic and human development

[Dean N Onyambu @InfinitelyDean]

"On calls for the MoU to be made public, professor Chilengi said it has not been the practice to make public any MoU signed between government and other institutions, and that anyone with specific concerns could engage the ministry privately."

Per my understanding, the administration's own Access to Information Act No. 24 of 2023, in force since June 2024, creates an enforceable right to information held by public bodies, built on a presumption of disclosure. Yes, there is an international relations exemption. But exemptions under the Act are claims to be justified request by request, subject to a public interest override. They are not a standing policy of non-disclosure. And the exemption most plausibly available here, ongoing negotiations, falls away once the MOU is signed on Thursday. "It has not been the practice" is not a legal position.

[Chilumba K. Bwalya @ChilumbaKBwalya]

An academic is primarily defined by a role and an institutional affiliation of sorts (teach, research, publish, build curriculum, engage in scholarly work, mentor etc). Others view it differently.

On the hand and my considered view is that at intellectual is better understood as a disposition and to an extent a public function (make sense or meaning of things, engage in questioning norms, shape understanding of complexity issues/contribute to their solutions etc).

That said, an intellectual does not necessarily need to hold an academic position, and vice versa.

In retrospect, an academic and or prof can publish lot of papers, teach/ have an outstanding academic CV but without substantially influencing/affecting/effecting how society thinks beyond their specialised field.

Conversely, a journalist like you nkashi Gandhi, @BuyoyaJonah, writer, economist such as @FMwenge @InfinitelyDean , entrepreneurs @monicamusonda @selfstyledking , theologian, scientist, lawyer @LindaKasonde or public commentator, among others can be or become an intellectual without holding a university appointment…. Lastly there are those who exist in both worlds such as @ssishuwa @Dora_Siliya and obviously also have one area that dominates other. My take 🫱🏽‍🫲🏾

[Dalitso Mvula @DalitsoMvula]

@Mike42726245 Why don't these have a NIS analyst attaché working within these parastatal

[Jowisa Jr @JWSakalajr]

@Airtel_Zambia kindly stop your Flash SMS Messages they're quite irritating and inconveniencing.

[Sentimental Foodie @SentimentalCook]

This right here is where the focus should be on, not this term limits horse shit.
By the way....HH can end all this buffoonery by simply addressing the nation and stating that even if there are calls to change the constitution to remove term limits, he's not interested in that...and that once he's served his second term, he'll become Zambia's statesman.
It is that simple. I was old enough when Chiluba tried to pull this shit and 26 years later we have to go through the same shit!!

[Retired Storyteller @villagemujika]

One thing guaranteed in Zambia’s political discourse is the monotony with which the same constitutional questions return. We keep revisiting issues that have already been examined, debated and recommended upon.

Mwanakatwe (1993), Mung’omba (2003), Silungwe (2012),
Mushabati(2025) all recommended appointment of ministers from outside Parliament.

The issue, therefore, is no longer simply what Constitution Review Commissions have recommended. The historical record is remarkably consistent.

The more consequential question is why recommendations from these processes have not translated into constitutional change.

[Dingindaba Jonah Buyoya @BuyoyaJonah]

One of the red flags for political leaders is the extent of begging they go to get that vote. What do you mean you’re down on all fours, begging to improve my life? I’m immediately suspicious😂

[Josiah Kalala @JosiahKalala]

1. The resolution calls for an independent and transparent investigation. The independence and transparency of what the government has announced here are questionable. Section 4 of the Inquests Act: "Whenever a coroner is credibly informed that the body of a deceased person is lying within his jurisdiction, and that there is reasonable cause to suspect that such person has died either a violent or an unnatural death, or in prison or in police custody, or in any place or circumstances which, in the opinion of the coroner, makes the holding of an inquest necessary or desirable, such coroner shall, except as otherwise provided in this Act, hold an inquest on such body as soon as is practicable." Why was there no Inquest?

2. Yes, the Judiciary is Independent. None of the people subject to the resolution and treason charges has been presented before the Judiciary to answer the charge. The Constitution and the CPC are clear on timelines for appearance. I am not comfortable with the government stating that people are entitled to something while denying them access to it. For context, during HH's treason allegation, he was arrested and detained on 11 April and appeared for mention on 18 April.

3. During the habeas corpus hearing involving 43 people who were detained, the State confirmed that none had been charged. The court subsequently ordered their release. The Human Rights Commission found that 84 people were held without charge. That is an official finding by a constitutional body.

I found it odd that the AG, the respondent in the habeas corpus applications, said there was no factual basis for the concerns CSOs raised...

4. There is no debate that the law permits law enforcement to use force; the resolution calls on the government to independently and transparently investigate allegations of unlawful use of force. To investigate allegations that the force used was disproportionate in the circumstances and therefore unlawful.

[Jay Gatsby/Arya Stark - 140 @Anarchy_Me_]

Dr. FRED M'MEMBE WRITES...

ON THE QUESTION OF PARAMOUNT CHIEFS

Let me begin with what is not in dispute.

Chief Mukuni is an old and honoured institution. The Leya people have lived along that stretch of the Zambezi for centuries, they were there before Livingstone was a town, before the railway, before the bridge, and before there was a Zambia to argue about. Nothing I say here takes anything away from them. Their history does not need my permission to be true, and it does not need a government notice to be true either.

But a petition has been filed in the Constitutional Court asking that Chief Mukuni be reclassified as a Paramount Chief. Three other traditional rulers have tried to enter that case and have been turned away. The country is now being invited to take sides between chiefs. Before we do that, we should ask a question that almost nobody is asking.

Where does the title of the paramount chief actually come from?

It does not come from our ancestors. It comes from a colonial filing cabinet.

In 1936, the colonial government passed two laws - Ordinance No. 9 and Ordinance No. 25. The Native Authorities Ordinance Number 9 covered Northern Rhodesia. The Barotse Native Authorities Ordinance Number 25 covered Barotseland.

The Native Authority Ordinance No. 9 of 1936 was a foundational colonial law enacted in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) that formalised and regulated traditional leadership and local administration under the system of indirect rule.

The Ordinance defined "Paramount Chief," "chief," or "sub-chief" as any native recognised as such by the colonial government, establishing the legal category of a "Native Authority" (which could be an individual chief, a council, or a group of natives).

The law shifted the legal framework from direct appointment to official government recognition by the territorial governor, who held the ultimate power to recognise, suspend, or withdraw recognition from traditional leaders.

It empowered Native Authorities to issue local orders and make rules for maintaining order, managing tribal areas, and developing tribal self-government on traditional lines.

Promulgated alongside complementary legislation, the ordinance facilitated the creation of Native Treasuries in 1937, allowing authorities to collect revenue, impose local rates, dues, and fees, and pay salaries to local administrative staff.

Much of the structure introduced by this 1936 ordinance—including government recognition of traditional leadership—carried forward into post-independence Zambian legal frameworks, influencing modern chieftaincy legislation.

Barotse Native Authority Ordinance No. 25 of 1936 was a parallel, distinct ordinance tailored specifically to the unique status of Barotseland and the Litunga (the Paramount Chief of the Barotse). It explicitly recognised the unique governing structure and the Paramount Chief of the Barotse within the protectorate framework.

It prompted the creation of Native Treasuries alongside Ordinance No. 10 of 1936 and allowed native authorities to collect taxes (such as poll and hut taxes), pay staff salaries, fund public works, and eventually build primary schools, clinics, and infrastructure by the 1950s.

Ordinance No.9 and Ordinance No.25 took the authority our peoples already had, and which they had exercised long before any European arrived, and sorted it into a colonial ladder. Areas were drawn. Offices were graded. Some men were entered in the register as paramount, others as senior, others as chiefs, others as sub-chiefs. Four were placed at the top, and four remained there today.

Our peoples had kings, councils, courts, and law long before 1936. That is not what the colonial government created. What it created was the ranking. The grading was not an act of respect for our traditions. It was an instrument of indirect rule. A small colonial administration could not govern this country by itself, so it graded our traditional authority into a chain of command, put itself at the top of that chain, and governed through it.

That is the honest origin of the word we are now quarrelling over.

Now consider what we ourselves did about this after independence, because we did do something about it, and we should be proud of it.

In 2016, we amended our Constitution. Article 165 says that the institution of chieftaincy is guaranteed and shall exist in accordance with the culture, customs, and traditions of the people to whom it applies. And it says something stronger. It says that Parliament shall not enact any law giving any person or any authority the right to recognise a chief or to withdraw recognition from a chief.

Read that again. Not the president. Not a minister. Not a permanent secretary. Nobody.

Then, in December 2019, the Constitutional Court finished the job. In the case brought by Chief Mwene Mutondo Mulubisha of the Nkoya people, the court struck down sections three to seven of the Chiefs Act and ordered that they be removed from our statute book altogether. Section three was the section that allowed the President, by statutory order, to recognise a person as the holder of the office of Paramount Chief, Senior Chief, Chief, or Sub-Chief. That power is gone. The court took it away because it was a colonial relic, and because chieftaincy belongs to the people whose chieftaincy it is.

So let us now answer the question plainly.

Who in Zambia today has the lawful power to make a paramount chief?

Nobody has it. The President does not have it. Parliament is forbidden from giving it to anyone. It was deliberately abolished, and it was abolished only seven years ago, in a case brought by a chief who was tired of being graded by politicians.

This is the part that troubles me most. The petition before the court invokes Article 165. But Article 165 is the very provision that exists to keep the state out of this. You can not ask the State to rank you by relying on the clause that forbids the State from ranking anybody. If that argument succeeds, we will not have corrected a colonial injustice. We will have restored the colonial machinery under a new name and handed the president back a power our own Constitutional Court took off him.

And we all know what that power would be used for because we have just come out of an election.

It is a matter of public record that Chief Mukuni endorsed the incumbent's re-election. I do not accuse him of a bargain, and I have no evidence of one. But I will say this, and I say it to every chief in this country. Once your elevation is sought from a government you campaigned for, you will never again be able to prove that your standing was earned rather than paid for. The suspicion alone is the damage. Your subjects will carry it long after the politicians who created it have moved on.

Only last week, I wrote that when traditional leaders surrender their independence to politicians, they are reduced to tools used during election cycles and discarded afterwards. I did not know then how quickly the point would be tested.

And where does this end? If rank can be granted, then the Lamba will ask, and the Lunda will ask, and the Kaonde, the Luvale, the Nkoya, the Namwanga, the Tonga, and the Mambwe will ask. Every one of them has a history as long and as proud as anybody else's. On what principled basis will the twentieth petitioner be refused what the first was given? We will spend the next decade ranking ourselves by tribe in a courtroom. In a country still bleeding from August, I can think of a few things more dangerous.

Now I must not be misunderstood because what follows is the heart of our position and it is the opposite of what some people will expect to hear from me.

We are not saying our chiefs should be quiet. We are saying they have been given far too little, not too much.

The Socialist Party has never said that the problem of this country is simply and solely one president or one political party. We have said it for years, and we will keep saying it. Our problem is the system of governance itself - imitekele, mibusezo. You can, every five years, remove a man and leave the system standing, and nothing changes. What we are seeking is not simply or solely a change of power or office occupant. It is a change of system of governance.

And at the centre of that change is a single demand: the Power must be shared.

Shared with whom? With all the authentic leaders of our people. Our traditional leaders. Our religious leaders. The other leaders our communities actually trust and actually listen to. Power must be returned to those in whom it was originally vested.

Before the colonisers came here, our people were governed by their chiefs. The chief was the supreme authority. There was nobody above him but God. We did not have local politicians in this territory until the late 1940s and early 1950s. And when the colonisers came and took our power, they did not take all of it. They left our chiefs something. It was after 1964, when our own politicians took over, that the rest was quietly and eventually taken away. Today, the politician governs alone. The rest are ceremonial and have to support the politician of the day in power.

For more than sixty years, this country has been led by the politician and by nobody else. Look where it has brought us!

And let nobody tell you that politicians governing alone is what a modern country looks like because it is not true. Look at the countries whose systems we copy so eagerly!

The United Kingdom is not governed by politicians alone. Its head of state is the monarch - King or Queen. The Church of England sits inside the state itself. There is a House of Lords, where men and women who have excelled in medicine, law, science, the arts, the military, and public service are brought in to give guidance and direction to society. And then there is the House of Commons, where the politicians sit, elected directly by the people and led by a Prime Minister. But no Prime Minister takes office until the monarch has assented to it.

And that United Kingdom is more than one country in one. Scotland has five million people, its own language, its own anthem, its own flag, its own banknotes, its own parliament, its own education system, and its own church. Wales has three million people, its own parliament, its own laws, and its own language. Northern Ireland has its own assembly. Each of them fields its own national soccer and rugby team and competes for the World Cup in its own name. And they remain one country.

Can we really learn nothing from that? I am not saying copy it. I am saying draw inspiration from it.

And it is not only the British. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Hungary, Austria, Portugal, Belgium, and Spain are all governed that way. The head of state of Japan is an emperor. Malaysia and Thailand are governed that way. So are many Arab states. And China, which has no kings and no queens, carries a civilisation of more than five thousand years and deliberately builds its history, its culture and its traditions into how it governs, through its own institutions and its own logic for bringing its people into government.

Look closely, and you will find something consistent. Where power is sufficiently shared, there is more political stability. And where there is more political stability, there is generally more economic progress.

But let me be very precise about what sharing power means because it will be deliberately misunderstood.

It does not mean traditional ceremonies and supporting the president of the day. Our ceremonies are magnificent, and I honour every one of them, but a ceremony is a ceremony, a tourist attraction, not a share of power or governance. Inviting a chief to sit under a canopy once a year and clap for a guest of honour is not participation in governance. It is decoration. Moreover, all institutions - religious, state, or government - have ceremonies of one form or the other.

We mean the real thing. We mean governance and economic decisions being made collectively or in a shared way, with the genuine participation of the other leaders of our people.

And if power is to be shared, then areas of leadership, of control, and influence must be properly defined. Chiefdoms must be defined and defined historically, not arbitrarily, and not by whoever happens to hold State House. That is the serious work waiting to be done in this country, and it is a far weightier question than which of our chiefs is addressed by which title.

Now let me show you the cost of what we have done instead, in figures that are not mine.

The five provinces of this country that had the strongest traditional leadership are today the five poorest provinces in Zambia. According to our own Living Conditions Monitoring Survey, Muchinga is the poorest at 82.6 per cent, followed by Western Province, which is Barotseland, at 78.6 per cent, then Northern Province at 78 per cent, then Luapula at 77.3 per cent, then Eastern Province at 76.4 per cent.

That is not a coincidence. Those are precisely the areas where a functioning system of traditional authority was hollowed out and replaced with nothing.

Everything in those areas was once properly managed, and it was managed by traditional leadership. Now go and look for the fish. It is depleted. Go and look for the game. It has been wiped out across most of those areas. Go and look for ifinkubala. It is finished. Mashroon. It hardly grows anymore. Birds of all sorts that used to fill the Barotse plains. They have gone to the Amazon. These places sit on immense natural wealth, and our politicians have failed to manage a single part of it.

So when I say that no title has ever fed a village, I am not belittling our chiefs. I am saying the opposite. We have handed them the ceremony and stripped them of power, and then we blame them for the poverty of the people they can no longer protect.

Our position is therefore simple, and it has not changed.

The State should have no hand in grading our chiefs because our Constitution says so, and our courts have said so. If the standing of any traditional institution is to be settled, let it be settled by the people whose institution it is, through their own customs, not by petition to a government and not as a reward for political loyalty.

But do not stop there, because that alone would leave our chiefs exactly where they are. Let us define our chiefdoms honestly and historically. Let us bring our traditional leaders, our religious leaders, and the other authentic leaders of our people into the places where governance and economic decisions are actually made. Let us end sixty years of the politician governing alone.

The dignity of a chief was never in the political ranking. It was always in the people. And, the power our chiefs need is not a title from a president. It is a real share in the government of this country.

Fred M'membe
President of the Socialist Party

[amnestypress @amnestypress]

Zambia: By cancelling passports, authorities are using administrative powers to silence critics.
https://t.co/rPPkvjRDpW

[Linda Kasonde @LindaKasonde]

#Zambia

@ssishuwa

[Grieve Chelwa @gchelwa]

Strength and solidarity with my friend and countryman @ssishuwa. His passport has been canceled by the Zambian government on bogus national security charges. His only crime: being Zambia’s most fearless public intellectual, using his pen to demand justice.

[Dean N Onyambu @InfinitelyDean]

I keep hearing people invoke Singapore, China and the Gulf states as though they have discovered the fatal weakness of democracy.

"China plans fifty years ahead. We don't need all this democracy. We need strong leadership."

Fine. But understand what you are actually admiring.

The states people keep citing did not succeed because they concentrated political power. They built capable states. Competent bureaucracies. Predictable rules. Serious consequences for corruption. Legal systems that citizens, businesses and investors could rely on. Even China, the favourite example, substitutes party discipline for legal restraint, and the cost of that trade is invisible until the day discipline fails, because nobody is allowed to audit it.

Removing democratic restraints is easy. Building institutions strong enough to stop concentrated power from degenerating into patronage, cronyism and arbitrary government is the hard part, and it is the part the admirers skip.

Religion does not solve it either. Some states ground their legal systems in Sharia. Many African societies are deeply religious. The institutional question stays the same: does the law bind the state? Can citizens rely on it? Do institutions keep functioning when functioning becomes inconvenient to those in power?

Independent courts, due process, the freedom to challenge the state, political competition, limits on executive power, peaceful transfers of power: these are not procedures standing in the way of governments that want to get things done. They are the machinery that answers those three questions. They look inefficient until the day you are the person who needs protection from the state.

And Africa should be careful with this conversation, because we have run the experiment. The continent of the 1960s and 1970s was also extraordinarily young. Youth did not cause the coups and the repression, but large young cohorts meeting weak institutions, economic exclusion and narrowing political space made combustible systems. Today's Africa is young again, and this generation is more urbanised, more educated and vastly more connected. That makes the casual romanticisation of authoritarianism more dangerous, not less.

Benevolent authoritarianism is not a myth. It can be done, and where it is done well it achieves things democracies struggle to match. I understand the structure and I understand why it works. I also understand why it fails, and it fails the same way every time: the structure has no answer for the day the benevolence stops. Everything depends on the person, and persons change, decline and die. Institutions are how a country survives its leaders. Maybe that is the conversation we should be having as we move on from last week.

Concentrating power does not give you Singapore. Without institutions, it gives you concentrated power. And history has produced far more examples of where that ends than it has produced Singapores.

[Umushudo Walowa @Umushudo_Walowa]

Twitter purveyors of democracy will swear there's nothing wrong with this despite overwhelming evidence, disgraceful.

[mnn. @MukuNotNice]

The paradox of authoritarian legality is that the court may ultimately depend on the very political authority it is theoretically supposed to restrain. Its independence is arguably conditional.

[Dean N Onyambu @InfinitelyDean]

Sishuwa said many things that I dismissed. At times, I thought he was being alarmist. Today, I find myself wondering whether he was right about more than I was willing to accept.

I have mates reminding me of 2021. I remember walking around the bank quietly encouraging people to vote for HH, even while my professional responsibility as an economist required neutrality in what I published. I believed Zambia needed change, and I believed HH was the right change for the economy.

That is what makes this moment difficult.

I keep coming back to a harder question: when power reveals character, what responsibility do those of us who helped confer that power bear for what follows?

You cannot reasonably be held responsible for everything a government later does simply because you supported it at an election. But you are responsible for what you do once the evidence in front of you begins to challenge what you believed. Do you confront it honestly, or do you start finding reasons to excuse what you would have condemned from the other side?

That question troubles me more than the politics.

Across this continent, we too often become more concerned with protecting the image of our countries than with asking whether what is happening inside them is fair and just. We worry about what the world will think when the more important question is what our own institutions and citizens should be able to expect.

This has been one of the quieter and sadder days I have experienced in the last few years. Not because I have suddenly reached every conclusion, but because some of the questions I once dismissed no longer feel easy to dismiss.

So I find myself going back to something more basic than politics.

Why am I here? What am I supposed to stand for? What is my purpose?

[jo🇦🇷🇪🇸 @KingkaSuli]

You don’t offer condolences when a life is taken under such undignified circumstances. You demand JUSTICE.

[the uncivil engineer @0xUnoftheo7]

Knowing how they move, if guns and all that were seized, they would have made videos and flooded the media with them💀 but anyways, who am I to talk on what I didn’t see💀

[Dean N Onyambu @InfinitelyDean]

This is one of the more interesting things about Zambia. People become extremely sensitive around the word tribalism, even when the voting pattern is plainly tribal or ethnic.

In Kenya, we are much more willing to call it what it is. People are proud of where they come from, ethnicity influences politics, and voting often follows those identities. You can dislike that reality, but pretending it does not exist does not make it disappear.

Zambia’s “One Zambia, One Nation” identity makes this conversation more uncomfortable. But that discomfort also exposes a vulnerability: strong regional voting blocs still exist even when people do not want to describe them in ethnic terms.

Southern Province is the clearest example. For roughly 25 years, its presidential vote has been overwhelmingly anchored to one political tradition. That is tribal or regional voting behaviour. And strategically, given how little time Mundubile had to campaign, and the security risk, there was very little electoral logic in spending scarce time trying to move a vote that has barely moved for a generation. The rational play was to concentrate on genuinely contestable provinces.

Calling the pattern tribal does not create it. The voting record already does.

[Vincent Mwale 🇿🇲 @VincentMwale]

Back in Parliament, and yes back to provide checks and balances! Thank you Chipangali West and all glory to God!