Is it time to subject President Hichilema to a psychiatric evaluation?
By Sishuwa Sishuwa
Responding to the growing complaints of debilitating hunger from starving ordinary Zambians during his recent press conference (see video clip attached), President Hichilema justified the hunger as an act of God, claiming that ‘hunger is Biblical’. Given that he seemed genuinely serious when saying this, Hichilema’s response suggests one of two possibilities.
The first is that Hichilema may have lost his marbles – the implication of which is the need to take mental health seriously, including when it manifests its symptoms in public leaders whom we often think are immune from such illnesses. We may be dealing with a president who needs help, not ridicule. A careful examination of some of his recent public statements reveals a worrying series of irrational and uncoordinated statements. Even at the same presser, Hichilema accused himself of “working hard” at a time when the country is sinking with major crises. This includes crippling power outages lasting as long as 20 consecutive hours a day.
He also inflicted praise on himself for being the first president of Zambia to meet King Charles III, the British traditional leader who ascended to the throne a year after Hichilema’s election. Hichilema, who appears to consider this meeting as an achievement, is overlooking the point that if Zambia’s previous presidents did not meet Charles or his predecessor, it may be because Charles was not yet King, or that they did not suffer from elements of inferiority complex that appear to emerge from his excitement about meeting the British monarchy – an excitement that he, perhaps without much awareness, openly exhibits whenever he meets white people. The only conclusive way we can rule out the possibility that Hichilema has lost his marbles is to subject him to a psychiatric evaluation that will establish if he is mentally sound and simply remarkably out of touch.
The second possibility is that Hichilema, in claiming that hunger is Biblical, may have been trying to conceal his administration’s policy failures by formulating a false narrative on the subject – that a natural disaster has caused hunger, electricity and water shortages, not the ruling party in general and its hard-working president in particular – and using the media to induce the public to accept it. We live in a world where, increasingly, what counts most is no longer recognising the “concrete reality” but building “narratives” around the actual reality. For inept liberal leaders and their supporters, winning this war of “narratives” requires hoodwinking ordinary people by manufacturing false public consciousness around the challenges that confront them.
By claiming that hunger is Biblical and a result of supernatural forces, Hichilema is (ab)using faith to shield himself from blame and completely divert people’s attention from the concrete reality that hunger is a human-made challenge, and that its occurrence, specifically in this case, is a consequence of the persistent failure of the government to plan better, ensure food security, and provide affordable food. The obvious fact of the matter is that the present government has been hugely negligent in relation to food security. In pursuit, recklessly, of the policy of liberalisation of maize trade, the Hichilema administration sold over one million tonnes of maize and mealie meal – all from the sufficient stock that was left behind by the previous administration – to other African countries when both commodities were already out of reach for Zambia’s starving population. He has also presided over a chaotic distribution of farming inputs that has badly affected agricultural production in recent years. Hichilema knows all this and his claim that the current hunger is an act of God is a result of either wilful and unforgivable dishonesty or a futile attempt to escape responsibility for his government’s policy failures – and whichever it is, neither is acceptable since it does not resolve the hunger problem.
I must concede that the warped and depressing thinking that human challenges like hunger are acts of God or nature is not restricted to Hichilema alone; it is a belief that is prevalent among Zambians today. I do not know if it is the dominant and degraded Christian theology and practice (which is largely pacifist) or a history of personalised rule, or perhaps both, that seem to have disrupted ideas of cause and effect among many Zambians. People do not attribute outcomes to their likely causes, but often to supernatural phenomena. They do not recognise their own agency and the agency of those around them. In removing human agency from the actual causes of hunger, Hichilema is exploiting the current national psyche and character structure of the ‘typical Zambian’: unquestioning, passive, cowardly, zombie-like, easy to manipulate, naive, superstitious, and worshipful of authority. I am curious to know if Hichilema thinks that countries elsewhere in the southern Africa region that also experienced drought but remain food secure are much more in God’s favour than Zambia.
There are times when I feel that Zambia must kill God, if we are to make progress. When God dies, we will take His place – our success or failure resting squarely on our shoulders. For the reality is that as long as our lives and how they turn out remain God’s will, we abdicate responsibility for changing our plight to that God. It also means our leadership, in our minds at least, is God’s choosing. So if that God gives us a Hichilema, we cannot question His wisdom, notwithstanding Hichilema’s obvious poverty of anything remotely resembling the virtue to be associated with a benevolent deity.