Was there really Tribalism in Zambian Elections?

By Chanda Chisala

There have been many critics of the last Zambian presidential election who saw evidence of “tribalism” in voting patterns, especially in the Southern Province where candidate Hakainde Hichilema typically received over 90 percent of the vote. Many people have said that this kind of statistic shows that the ugly vice of tribalism is alive and well in Zambia and they believe that we should find “solutions” to this “urgent” and “dangerous” problem. They even invoke images of the Hutu-Tutsi war that led to the murder of many innocent Tutsis just because of their ethnicity.

But is there really a problem of tribalism? I argue that there is no evidence of that, at least not from the voting patterns, even if one can show that the voters from these regions did indeed prefer their candidate based on his tribe or ethnicity – we still commonly use the word “tribe” in Zambia, even if intellectuals in some other countries find the word offensive.

Tribalism is much more than just preferring your tribesman, whether as spouse or friend or workmate or president. It also means actually hating other tribes. When you merely prefer your tribesman in elections, it does not mean that you hate the tribes of the other candidates and would be thus willing to see them murdered in some kind of tribal genocide.
Similarly, racism is not just preferring someone of your own race, whether as spouse or friend or business partner or president. Racism requires that you also hate another race and see every member of that race as morally inferior, no matter what they have done or who they are. A racist would never vote for candidates of another race, even if no one is standing from his own race. Black people in America have overwhelmingly voted for Obama, but we know that this is not a sign of their “racism” since they have voted for white candidates before and still do in other elections. The Southern province voted for Hakainde Hichilema, but they have also voted for other candidates (including “Bemba” candidates) in the past, which should make it hard for any objective person to build a case of “tribalism” against them. In these recent elections, they have definitely preferred a candidate who comes from there.

Preferring a candidate from your group or region is common even in very developed democracies. In the United States, political analysts almost always take it for granted that a candidate will win the vote of the state that he comes from, even if that state normally votes for another party. It’s always a surprise when a person loses his own home state. In short, for the people in someone’s home state to vote against him, they have to be really convinced that he is a very wrong choice for them. Otherwise, they will vote for him even if he has a few small disadvantages over another candidate, just because of the pride of having their own “son” rising to the highest office!
But in Zambia, we think it is a very big problem that needs to be “solved” if a person keeps winning the votes of the people he grew up with, the votes of the province that he proudly calls his home!

As our political culture advances, people will need to stop being too idealistic and deal with facts as they are about human nature, not as they wish they would be in an alternate universe. It is not only “tribalism” (hate for other tribes) that motivates people to vote for their own tribesman. It can simply be a sense of pride to see one of their own rise to the top, or it can be that they feel they have not been respected as much as they should and want to earn the respect of other tribes by showing that they can also lead, or it can even be that they think they will receive some regional favors if they elect someone from their group (maybe a new school or university?). You can argue about whether these are legitimate reasons for preferring a candidate from your region, but you can not just say it is “tribalism” and it will “lead to Rwanda” etc. Such sentiments are what can lead to more problems than the imaginary “problem” they are attempting to “solve”.

What political strategists need to figure out is how to make sufficient inroads in the region of a candidate that commands the strong loyalty of “his” people. But this task can be so difficult that sometimes it is better just to assume that you have lost that region and might need to just minimize your losses while maximizing your gains in other “battleground” areas. But when you do lose in that region, it is not wise to claim that it is just because they are “tribalists” or “regionalists” because this just sparks more unnecessary tensions. It is perfectly normal for people to support their own man, unless they can see that their own man is absolutely the worst choice for them. In short, the Southern Province would have to be convinced that Hakainde Hichilema would be a very bad option for their lives even if he comes from their area, in order for them to ignore their natural loyalty to their own local “son”.

An example of violation of this normal aspect of human nature was when former president Rupiah Banda’s son decided to go against his own father’s candidature in the MMD and endorsed a candidate from another party. This is not normal, just by what we know of human nature, because we expect a person to support his own father and a father to support his own son, even if someone else is a bit better. But when this kind of family division happens, we know that the son probably has very strong reasons that exceed the expected familial loyalty. Similarly, the only time we expect people who have lived in a certain region for many generations to vote against a person who not only hails from that particular region, but also grew up among them, speaks their language proudly, and loves their treasured culture, is if they can be convinced that there is something very wrong with him and he would be a very bad choice for them.

In a country where you don’t even have good education among most of the population (for people to understand different policy ideas), besides the fact that the different parties and candidates do not have clear ideological differences, it is very unrealistic to expect that you can easily find something to sway a region against their own “son.”

Nevers Mumba of the MMD launched his campaign in Chinsali by appealing to their pride in supporting a person who was born and raised in their area. There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing wrong if Hichilema does the same thing and it works. That’s politics.

The bottom line is that there is no fundamental moral problem with so-called “regionalism” and there is no need to try to find “solutions” (by labeling it as “tribalism”), beyond just improving the campaign methods of your preferred candidate. Idealistic attempts at changing human nature through some “solutions” by educated elites, is really what can be dangerous, because you need to start by labeling certain people as having a unique moral problem that you need to solve since you are morally superior to them!