Musakanya's Burden

I first came across the ideas of Valentine Musakanya when my local book club included on its reading list a book entitled “the Musakanya Papers: The autobiographical writings of Valentine Musakanya”. The book itself is a poorly packaged affair, in white paperback, featuring a grainy picture of a bespectacled Valentine Musakanya, flashing a toothy smile. It is edited by Miles Larmer a British professor of African History. Published by the Lembani Trust, the book is a collection of Musakanya’s biographical writings picked from his over 220 thousand word hand-written notes. At the time of the publication in 2007, Lembani Trust had announced that the “Musakanya Papers” was just the first in a planned number of publications from Musakanya’s writings. With ten years gone since the first publication however, there is no indication that a sequel is on the way.

Followers of Zambia’s post-independence history will recognise Musakanya as the country’s first Secretary to the Cabinet who went on to serve the country in other notable positions including as Governor of the Central Bank and Minister of State under Kenneth Kaunda’s United National Independence Party (UNIP). His disappearance from public life would see him become IBM Africa general manager, a job he took on with his trademark dedication and razor sharp intellect.

Despite all of this, Musakanya is perhaps best known for his role in the 1980 coup attempt against Kaunda’s UNIP government. Musakanya along with others such as lawyer Edward Shamwana were arrested and charged with treason and later convicted by the High Court of Zambia and sentenced to hang. Musakanya managed to have his conviction overturned upon appeal to the Supreme Court though not before he had spent a good four years in jail. There are two versions regarding the grounds for Musakanya’s appeal to the Supreme Court." Miles Larmer states that the appeal was based on evidence that Musakanya’s confession was obtained through torture, while Andrew Sardanis, a man Musakanya once referred to as a “brother” and who has written extensively on Zambia’s contemporary history, roundly discredits the allegations of torture and insists that Musakanya was never tortured but that rather the conviction was overturned on the basis that the High Court judge relied on Police interrogation notes which were erroneously admitted as evidence of a confession.

Musakanya emerged from jail a much changed man. He passed away in 1994.

The Musakanya Papers continue to provide a voice for this remarkable man. They contain much more than a detail of Musakanya’s role in the 1980 coup attempt. Understandably though, some reviews of the book have devoted more space to the coup issue. The book contains ideas, opinions and observations regarding public policy, leadership and the themes of the time as seen through Musakanya’s keen eye.

Dr Guy Scott who served as Zambian Republican Vice President in the Patriotic Front government hailed Musakanya’s writings as perhaps the most plausible explanation of how one Kenneth David Kaunda took over a prosperous “high end” underdeveloped nation in 1964 and turned it, over 27 years, into a bankrupt, disease-ridden, police state in which the public were constantly invoked. Although Dr Scott’s view is an over simplification, Musakanya’s writings show that there was certainly scope for managing the affairs of the country differently.

The book contains Musakanya’s candid and lucid views on issues that affected him not only as the Head of the Civil service but also his ideas on rural development, national philosophies and an assessment of Kenneth Kaunda the man.

On what makes a good civil servant, Musakanya insisted that a civil servant should be truly educated and not merely certified. One suspects that Musakanya would have been highly critical of the current wave of questionable education institutions in Zambia, whose only purpose apart from making money, is fuelling of empty credentialism. Added to these, Musakanya regarded a good civil servant as one who provided leadership, could delegate and was knowledgeable in the law. In his own words, a civil servant should be a man of “solid, all-round intellectual capacity, who continues to keep himself abreast with the current voluminous general knowledge and finds its place in history, past and future”.

Musakanya’s insistence on knowledge is perhaps exhibited in his abhorrence of a certain political cadre he termed educated illiterates. His writings exhibit a veritable irritation with a number of individuals who were allowed to occupy certain offices without the requisite educational skills. This however must be understood against the backdrop of the UNIP’s government twin quest to “Zambianise” the economy, while at the same time trying to mollify its members by offering them jobs even when they were ill-qualified for the same jobs. For example he noted that despite Zambia’s first cabinet being keen and enthusiastic, much of the substance discussed in cabinet meetings was generally above their heads.

The Musakanya Papers also provide rare insight into the relationship between the then president Kenneth Kaunda and his one-time colleague, turned political opponent, the late Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe. Although Kaunda and Kapwepwe started out as very close associates having grown up together in Chinsali, Kaunda was dogged by the lack of a constituency he could depend on as it was a well-known fact then that his parents had hailed from Malawi (This fact was cruelly exploited when the Movement for Multi-party Democracy government managed to amend the republican constitution and made it unlawful for anyone without Zambian parentage to contest presidential elections in Zambia. Kenneth Kaunda and his UNIP boycotted the 1996 elections in protest against this provision).

The book also shows the lengths to which Kaunda was willing to go in order to maintain a certain perception of himself among the local public as well as the international community. Perhaps as a result of his lack of a constituency and the desire to preserve power, Musakanya describes Kaunda as exhibiting pathological ambivalence. For example, there were image building undertakings which included engaging British image builders Colin Morris and Mervyn Temple. This coupled with the crafting of an ambitious yet ambiguous national philosophy “Humanism” was meant to project the then modern African leader, vibrant, intelligent and patriotic.

 This strategy was clearly flawed. Despite the creation of a Ministry of Humanism and the philosophy being taught in schools, few if any knew what Humanism really entailed. Apart from being a rallying point for slogans, there was little to distinguish Humanism from socialism/communism. As Musakanya notes, although more money was spent on Humanism than that spent by all Christian churches in Zambia, apart from belief, there was really nothing that Humanism achieved.

Musakanya has been dead for over two decades, yet his apt observations on government and Zambian society in general remain relevant to this day. Although the 1980 attempted coup continues to cast a lengthy shadow over his legacy there is enough in his writings to make the modern day leader stop and think.

Times might have changed, yet the way politics are done in Zambia continues to follow an eerily familiar pattern. The country has failed to adequately diversify its economy. Politics continue to be devoid of substance with political allegiance in the main clustered along regional and tribal cleavages as evidenced by the distribution of electoral results for all major elections. Political leadership continues to be flagrantly build around individual loyalties and patronage. Indeed Valentines voice though distant is as relevant today as it was decades ago. And for this reason Valentine Musakanya should never be forgotten.