On December 13, 1972, Zambia’s founding president, Kenneth Kaunda, signed into law the Constitution (Amendment) Acts, numbers 3,4 and 5 ending the country’s First Republic and ushering in a new constitution for the country, which promised a “One-Party Participatory Democracy” under “one and only one party…., namely, the United National Independence Party (UNIP).” All of this was to be realised under an official ideology of “Humanism.” The previous day, Zambia’s Court of Appeal had thrown out the case brought by veteran nationalist, Harry Nkumbula, in his appeal from the decision of the High Court dismissing his case against the establishment of a one-party state. 

The developments leading to Zambia’s detour into one-party authoritarianism under President Kaunda should offer a cautionary lesson to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and all those cheering him on in his transparent efforts to turn Nigeria into a single-party state devoid of opposition parties. 

Zambia’s march to one-party rule began following the general election in December 1968. At that election, the ruling UNIP, led by President Kaunda, had won an overwhelming majority. The African National Congress (ANC) of Harry Nkumbula came a distant second, with a handful of members of parliament confined to Nkumbula’s stronghold in the southern province. 

The constitution adopted at Zambia’s independence in 1964 established a multi-party system of government. In 1940, Godwin Lewanika emerged as the president of the Northern Rhodesia Congress, the first organised political party in the country that would later come to be known as Zambia. 11 years later, the party became known as Northern Rhodesia African National Congress under the leadership of Harry Nkumbula, a teacher. Kenneth Kaunda emerged two years later as the secretary-general of the party. 

As their advocacy against white rule intensified, Nkumbula became more emollient while Kaunda became radicalised. Following a split in the party, Kaunda emerged in 1958 as the leader of the faction within the Zambia African National Congress (ZANC). In March 1959, the party was banned, and Kaunda was imprisoned. UNIP was formed from the ashes of the banned ZANC while Kaunda was in detention. Upon his release, Kaunda was installed as the leader of UNIP. In April 1961, Nkumbula was imprisoned for causing death by dangerous driving. By the time he emerged from jail in January 1962, Kaunda had eclipsed him politically.

Kaunda’s UNIP led the country to independence in 1964, with Harry Nkumbula as leader of the opposition. Following the December 1968 elections, however, the speaker of the National Assembly, Robinson Nabulyato, declined to recognise Nkumbula’s ANC as the leader of the opposition, claiming that the party could neither form a quorum nor execute the business of parliament or government. In doing this, Speaker Nabulyato channelled his party leader, President Kaunda, who, mistaking himself for the country, had declared on the eve of Christmas in 1968: I cannot see how I can continue to pay a police officer or civil servant who works for Nkumbula…. How dare they bite the hand that feeds them? They must learn that it pays to belong to UNIP.”

As President Kaunda centralised power around himself, party management became more embittered, turning into a contest between Zambia’s ethnic rivalries. In February 1972, with his most prominent political opponents detained, President Kaunda appointed a Commission to work out the modalities for a new constitution based on single-party rule. 

The job of the Commission was not to determine whether the country wanted to be run under one-party rule. Kaunda had already decided that it would. The only issue was how to bring that about. Comprising 21 members, Kaunda tapped Mainza Chona, his loyal Vice-President, to chair the Commission. Harry Nkumbula, leader of the ANC, declined his nomination as a member of the Commission. Reflecting the sceptical mood of the country, a basic education teacher advised the Commission at one of its public hearings that “the National Assembly should be turned into flats, since there was a housing shortage in Lusaka (the capital city) and no need for parliament in a one-party state.”

In October 1972, the Mainza Chona Commission reported to President Kaunda. Shortly before receiving the report, Kaunda dismissed opponents of single party rule as “idiots and lost sheep”; told the public service that they existed “to serve the party in power”; and informed “the churches and the judiciary that their continued independence rested on being effective ‘mirror reflections’ of the nation”, which he subsumed in the ruling party. 

Things moved swiftly thereafter. One month after receiving the report, in November 1972, Kaunda issued his white paper on the recommendations of the Mainza Chona Commission. On 8 December 1972, Zambia’s National Assembly did something that observers of Godswill Akpabio’s 10^th National Assembly will by now have grown used to: the parliament suspended their rules and standing orders and, in one swift afternoon session, passed three separate bills to amend the constitution, rushing each through first, second and third readings without debate or discussion. 

Four days later, the Court of Appeal perfunctorily dispensed with Harry Nkumbula’s legal challenge. The following day, Kaunda signed the bills into law, heralding the arrival of Zambia’s second Republic as a single-party state. 

The new Constitution itself was not published until May 1973. The following month, on June 27, 1973, Harry Nkumbula signed the so-called Choma Declaration, dissolving his ANC and announcing that he and the remaining members of his party had joined Kaunda’s UNIP. His capitulation was complete, as was Kaunda’s transformation into the autocrat that he dearly desired to be. Delta State’s Sheriff Oborevwori in Nigeria will be relieved to know that he is not without storied predecessors in the pantheon of political harlotry. 

Zambia was not the only country in which the judiciary acted as midwife to dismantling democratic pluralism and replacing it with a one-party autocracy. At its 1965-66 session, Sierra Leone’s parliament adopted a resolution asking the government to “give serious consideration to the introduction of a one-party system of government.” To implement this resolution, in April 1966, the government established a committee with the Orwellian mission to “collate and assess all views on the one-party system, both in and out of Parliament, and to make recommendations on the type of one-party system suitable for Sierra Leone.” 

Three months later, the government issued its white paper based on the committee’s recommendations. On January 3, 1967, the Supreme Court of Sierra Leone dismissed the legal challenge to the process of converting the country to a single-party rule due to a series of legal technicalities. Unknown to them, Sierra Leone’s descent into eventual conflict in the next generation had begun.

It is impossible to behold the orchestrated emptying of opposition political parties currently ongoing in Nigeria without recalling these examples from sister African countries, which presaged a deeper descent into constitutional instability. The return of President Tinubu to the country after his extended Lenten retreat to the land of the Marian Apparition (in Lourdes) has coincided with a rush of politicians seeking to outdo one another in emptying the country of viable political parties. 

Ironically, President Tinubu himself represents the example of a politician who resisted this tendency. After President Obasanjo’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stole nearly all of the South-West from his Alliance for Democracy (AD) in 2003, Tinubu, then the only surviving opposition governor in the region, refused to give in. It took him two decades of backbreaking work to rebuild and work his way to the top of the country’s political scene. As he embarks on his transparent journey to a “one-party participatory democracy”, President Tinubu may wish to be reminded that of the major misfortunes in life, few are as ruinous as the tragedy of fulfilled desires.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu