RIGHTS-ZAMBIA: It’s Not Patriotic to Criticise the Government

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Anthony Mukwita

LUSAKA, May 28 1998 (IPS) - Zambia’s government has gone on the offensive against non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that have criticised its human rights performance, branding them “unpatriotic”.

The government has charged that the NGOs lobbied Western donors early this year to withhold aid from the Southern African country. The result was that at a Consultative Group meeting this month in Paris, France, Zambia was promised about 100 million dollars less than the roughly 630 million it had requested.

Finance Minister Edith Nawakwi said she was disappointed that some Zambian NGOs had joined foreign ones in lobbying against aid to Zambia. “How can one campaign for his own country not to get aid?” she asked. “What is going to happen to that poor old woman or man in the far-flung areas of the country if the campaign succeeds … people would starve and will the NGOs help them?”

Politicians are now suggesting that some vocal NGOs ought to be deregistered before they cause harm to the country.

But the NGOs charge that the government has deliberately misread their campaign. They say it’s not that they want Zambia to stop receiving aid. What they want is for the donors to tie their aid to conditions such as good governance, respect for human rights and the strengthening of checking mechanisms like the local Anti-Corruption Commission and Human Rights Commission.

“Our interest,” says Ngande Mwanajiti of the Lusaka-based Inter-Africa Network for Human Rights and Development (AFRONET) “is not to see the Zambian people suffer because the country has not received aid.

“All we are asking is that the donors give Zambia aid but they tie it to conditions that shall force the government to improve its human rights record and that of governance.”

And improvements are needed in these areas, according to Alfred Zulu of the Zambia Independent Monitoring Team (ZIMT). “It is not a secret,” he says, “that Zambian prisoners are probably living under the worst conditions in Africa and when we call on the donors … to tie their aid to these things I do not see why we should be given tags like ‘traitor’ or ‘unpatriotic’.”

Relations between the government of President Frederick Chiluba and Zambia’s NGOs have been poor in recent years, especially after presidential elections in 1996, from which the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) barred its main opponents through controversial constitutional amendments.

A clause limiting eligibility for the presidency to people whose parents were born Zambians ruled out United National Independence Party (UNIP) leader and former head of state Kenneth Kaunda, who is of Malawian parentage. And a stipulation barring traditional rulers from running for president took care of UNIP number two, Inyambo Yeta, a chief of the minority Lozi ethnic group.

After Chiluba was sworn in, 19 NGOs that had come together to form the Committee for a Clean Campaign (CCC) declared that the elections were not free and fear.

The CCC based its evaluation partly on the fact that the constitution was discriminatory since it barred some people interested in running for president from doing so. Another reason given by the CCC was the fact that the opposition parties were not given equal access to the state media.

The governement responded by claiming that the NGOs, especially those in the CCC, were “sell-outs” paid by Western donors to declare the elections flawed even though, the MMD claimed, they were fairer than those held in other Southern African countries.

NGO offices were searched by the security forces, while some NGO personalities were jailed. However, despite the intimidation, they have continued to play a watchdog role.

“Our job,” said one NGO leader, “is to check the government, to see that they are delivering the services to the citizenry and not back-tracking on some promises earlier made … the moment we stop doing this because we have been intimidated, we would have failed in our duty.”

What remains to be seen is whether the government will again sit down with the NGOs so as to agree on ways to work together or at least arrive at some sort of modus vivendi.

One such meeting was held in late 1997, but what the government proposed was that the NGOs should be regulated, and that was flatly rejected by the non-governmental groups.

The NGOs have since made a counter-proposal: that they regulate themselves in much they same way that the independent media, which had been faced with the same predicament, has appointed a self-regulatory body.