|
|
AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
Show panel list
The populist challenge to rationalized politics in Zambia
| Panel |
51. Agency and the constitution of publics in Southern Africa
|
| Paper ID | 449 |
| Author(s) |
Gould, Jeremy
|
| Paper |
View paper (PDF)
|
| Abstract | In 2001, the Zambian Law Association, Zambia’s main Church bodies and the Zambian women’s movement joined forces to block an unconstitutional bid to extend the presidential tenure of then-incumbent Frederick Chiluba. Calling themselves the Oasis Forum, the coalition represented an new kind of non-partisan political player in Zambia’s public realm. The Forum’s mass mobilization campaigns in the run-up to the 2001 elections, and its subsequent confrontations with the government over constitutional reform were, and continue to be heavily publicized and supported by Zambia’s main independent newspaper, the Post.
The alliance between the Post and the Oasis Forum has exhibited many of the hallmarks – in both form and content - of an emerging ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in classical habermasian terms. The rhetoric of the Forum – strongly influenced by its lawyer-activists – quickly found a common tune with that of Post editor, publisher/itinerant lawyer Fred Mmembe, in its attention to constitutional issues, in particular, and in a legal-rational approach to political problems (i.e., the alleged kleptocracy of the Chiluba regime) more generally.
This apparent ‘rationalization’ of the public realm coincided with Zambia’s access to substantial debt cancellation by international creditors in 2006, as well as to a thirty-year apex in the international price of copper (Zambia’s main export). On the brink of the 2006 general elections, the numerically tiny Lusaka-based cosmopolitan elite that dominates the partisan and the non-partisan political realm was infused with optimism and looked to the elections as an opportunity to eject the corrupt Movement for Multiparty Democracy from power and consolidate a more legal-rational political regime.
Imagine, then, the shock waves that went through cosmopolitan public when the neo-populist Patriotic Front, and its leader, charismatic Michael Sata won virtually all parliamentary and local government seats in Zambia’s main urban centers. Sata, viewed with deep suspicion by the cosmopolitan illuminati and demonized by the Post, captured the imagination of the marginalized urban masses. While he failed to win the republican presidency, he and his party are now positioned to redefine the contours of Zambian politics.
This paper will draw on primary materials and media commentary to analyze Sata’s challenge to the emerging ‘legal-rational public sphere’ in Zambia, and the political implications of PF’s neo-populism for the constitution of ‘the public’ in Zambia.
|
|