Maravi

Portrait of a ‘reluctant politician’

Portrait of a ‘reluctant politician’
Written by Staff Reporter
Sunday, August 30, 2009 4:58:03 PM

To his political enemies, he was a cabbage who was not fit to be President.
To his children, he was “Tiger”—the short-tempered yet doting father whose growl was often fiercer than his bite. To his wife, he was the simple man who wanted nothing more than to hold her hand, sit on the State House lawn with her in the moonlight and chat - away from the omnipresence of security personnel. To his close friends, he was the “reluctant politician” who preferred the sobriety of the courtroom to the shadiness of the corridors of power. To those who worked for him, he was a man who did not suffer fools gladly or pull his punches.

To those of us who did not really know him except for what we read about him in the press or heard him say on radio and television, he was simply Levy Patrick Mwanawasa, State Counsel. A man comedians loved to imitate…

But who was the enigma behind the name? This is a question Amos Malupenga tries to answer in a biography of the late Republican president he wrote entitled Levy Patrick Mwanawasa: An Incentive for Posterity.

The biography is a tapestry of impressions - woven from interviews with Levy himself, colleagues, his first wife, Ann Ziba, the mother of Patrick Jr, his widow, Maureen, his children, friends and foes alike.

Their contrasting views of some of the major events in the life and times of Levy Patrick Mwanawasa makes for interesting reading.

For instance, Ms Ziba’s memories of their painful divorce differ significantly from his. According to him, she was a bad stepmother to his first daughter, Miriam, whom he had outside wedlock and for three-and-half years, was raised by his elder sister, Violet.

He recollects: “When I got married, I got Miriam from my sister. By that time, she must have been three or four years old. But her stepmother didn’t look after (her). I would be in Lusaka for duty and she (Miriam) could get sick at nursery school, but my wife would fail to go and collect her from school. Instead she would ask her friend to go and collect ‘Mr Mwanawasa’s child. These things annoyed me so much... I thought that my friend (Ann) was suspecting that I was worried at the fact that she was not giving me any babies, so she was sensitive…She couldn’t get on well with my mother, my sisters, my young brother. She regarded them as enemies…”

But Ann Ziba’s take on the events that led to the collapse of the relationship between them is in stark contrast with Levy’s, though she chooses not to give details about an incident which involved Mwanawasa’s mother and his sister Violet.

His relatives, she says, had a strong influence on him and wanted him to divorce her because she could not conceive for a long time. She believes things got to a head when she lost her wedding ring. “I had removed the ring from my finger when I was washing plates. After that I went into the bedroom to apply some lotion on my hands. When I returned to the kitchen, I could not find the ring. I asked some of Levy’s relatives who were visiting, including his sister Violet, but they all said they had not seen the ring.”

Levy’s childhood was hard and painful. His father was a self-made man who did not spare the rod. One day, in an extreme act of punishment, the old man burnt all his clothes except the ones his son had on his back. He was at Chiwala Secondary School at the time.

When he went to Ndola en route to school, he decided to ask some relatives to help him out but they all refused. If the headmaster had not intervened, he probably would not have finished school. It was one memory he never forgot.

Years later, his cousin and her husband, now broke, called on him for financial help and Levy’s young sister, Rona, with a reputation for bluntness, reminded them of how they had mistreated her brother when he was a poor school boy. “You ill-treated the man you are asking money from. You made him sleep on the floor. You couldn’t even give him a ‘susu’! They were embarrassed,” Levy recollects.

But it is Levy Patrick Mwanawasa’s supposed reluctant flirtation with politics that yields some of the choicest anecdotes in Malupenga’s biography and will undoubtedly give readers a rare glimpse into how the rough-and tumble game of power is played.

Take the circumstances that led to his appointment as Solicitor-General by Dr Kenneth Kaunda back in the day when UNIP ruled supreme for instance. The year was 1985 and the UNIP government sent out feelers with the view to appointing Levy Solicitor-General. But there was one problem. He wasn’t a member of the party, which in turn meant that at that point in time, he wasn’t politically correct.

But as he recalls, “The System” sorted out the problem. The Ndola District-Governor at the time asked him for his National Registration Card and sold him a UNIP party card which he backdated two years! So much for political correctness…

However, the job of Solicitor-General was short-lived, lasting a year. Why was he fired? Levy claimed he was dismissed because KK accused him of supporting people he, as head of state, was detaining without trial, including his Malian business partner.

But KK remembers things somewhat differently but defers telling all, insisting that he will set the record straight in his own memoirs.

From that point on, the plot begins to thicken, exploring the source of the acrimonious relationship Mwanawasa had with former Republican President Frederick Titus Chiluba and Patriotic Front leader, Michael Chilufya Sata.

In characteristic fashion, Sata says Mwanawasa plodded through his presidency surrounded by mercenaries, including people who claimed to be his relatives. He singles out one particular individual for dishonourable mention - the current Vice-President. “Levy Mwanawasa has so much trust for his justice minister, George Kunda but George Kunda has no confidence in the President. He trusts Secretary to the Cabinet, Dr. Joshua Kanganja,” he noted.

The book is replete with such barbed references from various political protagonists. Mwanawasa himself names a number of prominent Zambian politicians who, in the heady days of Zambia’s return to multi-partyism, declared they would never work under Frederick Chiluba.

The late president had some choice quotes about Anderson Mazoka who invited him to join the United Party for National Development (UPND, and the man who succeeded him, Hakainde Hichilema.

The temptation to give away the plot and sub-plots of the tragicomedy of Zambian politics and all the Machiavellian machinations behind closed doors in the citadel of power is great but that would not be fair to those who want to read Malupenga’s biography for themselves.

That said, the late Mwanawasa did not believe for once the accident that almost claimed his life just after six in the morning on 8 December 1991 when he was Vice-President. Though he doesn’t name names, he believed there was definitely foul play involved. For a start, the vehicle that hit into his, killing his aide-de-camp instantly, was driven by an official from State House. Secondly, though the driver who was driving the car that hit into his was charged with causing death by dangerous driving, four days before he could testify in court, he died mysteriously in the Eastern Province. His death was not prominently reported.

The man’s wife would later pass a message on to Mr. Mwanawasa that on the eve of the accident, her husband came home very drunk but with more money than she had ever seen in her life. She said he gave her the money and told her he probably would never return home when he went to work the following day. In spite of his worst fears, he did return home, but his days were numbered. So when he died under inexplicable circumstances, she wasn’t altogether surprised.

If there is one thing that some of the cloak-and-dagger disclosures in Levy Mwanawasa’s biography reveals, it is the fact that politics isn’t for the faint-hearted.

But for all his reported aversion to the murky world of politics and the misgivings of his mother, Mama Mokola, Levy returned to the fray. Question is: why? The reasons he gave Malupenga in an interview about why he went back to a job he clearly hated are unlikely to convince many, especially those who followed closely how the late President threw himself into campaigning as the MMD candidate for the top job.

By his own admission, he formed a committee to raise money and to spearhead his campaign outside the MMD election machine after it became evident that the incumbent, Mr. Chiluba did not want him to be directly involved in the electoral campaign. His reason: “Mr. Chiluba wanted to deliver the presidency to me because he wanted to make sure he was the boss. Don’t forget he was forced to abandon the third term issues so he was expecting that I would be dependent on him.”

What Mr Chiluba makes of all this is not known. However, the former republican president calls his prosecution on charges of corruption by the Mwanawasa regime as a “betrayal of his confidence”. Indeed some of the late president’s detractors feel that his war against corruption was doomed to failure right from the start because it was targeted at one man: Frederick Titus Chiluba.

They say in his haste to remove the specks from the eyes of those around him, he forgot to remove the log from his own. In this regard, they were accusing him of other forms of corruption, that is plucking clansmen and women from his family tree and from his own ethnic group and giving them cushy jobs in government and in the diplomatic service.

Mwanawasa denied ever being tribalistic and nepotistic in his appointments. However, he had this to say in his defence: “What has happened is that in my government, I have destroyed the empire because to be appointed in the foreign service during the last regime, you had to be Bemba. If the Ambassador was not Bemba, the deputy had to be Bemba.”

Such disclosures make Malupenga’s biography a must-read for those interested in contemporary Zambian politics and in the characters who play the game.

At the end of it all, one question begs to be answered. Did Mwanawasa know that he would not live to see the end of the second term of his presidency? Why else would he have recorded his last will and testament to the Zambia people four years before he died without the knowledge of his wife?

No one will ever know for sure, but anyone who reads An Incentive for Posterity should have a clearer picture of who Levy Patrick Mwanawasa was.

In a glowing tribute that makes up the foreward of the book, Tanzanian President Jakaya Kikwete described the late Levy Patrick Mwanawasa as “a courageous and principled leader”. But perhaps the honours of giving the testimonial should have fallen to another next-door neighbour - Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe.

Memories of Mwanawasa’s much-publicised spat with Mugabe over the Zimbabwe crisis when he was SADC chairperson are still fresh in many minds. Levy had called an emergency summit of regional heads of state to discuss the crisis, extending an invitation to Mugabe’s arch rival. Morgan Tsvangirai. Mugabe, for his part, dismissed Mwanawasa as a surrogate of the West who had been conscripted by Britain and the United States to effect regime change in Zimbabwe.

Of course, Mugabe did send his condolences when Levy died and made a subdued appearance at the state funeral. But what did he really think of the man who likened Zimbabwe to a sinking ship, the Titanic and was the first African leader to call for a postponement of the presidential run-off election to avert what he described as “a political catastrophe in the SADC region”?

That might have to wait till Mugabe writes his own memoirs. For now, though, all we have to go on is Amos Malupenga’s portrait of the reluctant politician we knew as Levy Patrick Mwanawasa.

An Incentive for Posterity will be launched on September 3 at the Hotel Intercontinental Lusaka. Thereafter copies will be on sale in all major bookshops and provincial offices of The Post.

Labels: MWANAWASA

posted by MrK @ 4:00 PM