Kenneth Kaunda
Kenneth Kaunda, also known as KK, was a Zambian politician who served as the first president of Zambia from 1964 to 1991. He was at the forefront of the campaign for independence from the British Empire, though he would subsequently establish himself as a dictator and oversee Zambia’s economic collapse once this was achieved. Dissatisfied with Harry Nkumbula's leadership of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress, he broke away and founded the Zambian African National Congress, later becoming the head of the socialist United National Independence Party.
Kaunda was the first president of independent Zambia. In 1973, following tribal and inter-party violence, all political parties except UNIP were banned through an amendment of the constitution after the signing of the Choma Declaration. At the same time, Kaunda oversaw the acquisition of majority stakes in key foreign-owned companies. The 1973 oil crisis and a slump in export revenues put Zambia in a state of economic crisis. Unrest forced Kaunda to change the rules that had kept him in power. Multi-party elections took place in 1991, in which Frederick Chiluba, the leader of the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy, ousted Kaunda.
He was briefly stripped of Zambian citizenship in 1998, but the decision was overturned two years later in 2000.
Early life
Kenneth Kaunda was born on 28 April 1924 at Lubwa Mission in Chinsali, then part of Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia, and was the youngest of eight children. His father, the Reverend David Kaunda, was an ordained Church of Scotland missionary and teacher, who had been born in Nyasaland and had moved to Chinsali, to work at Lubwa Mission. His mother, Helen Nyirenda Kaunda, was also a teacher and was the first African woman to teach in colonial Northern Rhodesia. They were both teachers among the Bemba ethnic group which is located in northern Zambia. His father died when Kenneth was a child. This is where Kenneth Kaunda received his education until the early 1940s. He later on followed in his parents' footsteps and became a teacher; first in Northern Rhodesia but then in the middle of the 1940s he moved to Tanganyika Territory. He also worked in Southern Rhodesia. He attended Munali Training Centre in Lusaka between 1941 and 1943. Early in his career, he read the writings of Mahatma Gandhi that he said: "went straight to my heart."Kaunda was a teacher at the Upper Primary School and Boarding Master at Lubwa and then Headmaster at Lubwa from 1943 to 1945. For a time, he worked at the Salisbury and Bindura Mine. In early 1948, he became a teacher in Mufulira for the United Missions to the Copperbelt. He was then assistant at an African Welfare Centre and Boarding Master of a Mine School in Mufulira. In this period, he was leading a Pathfinder Scout Group and was Choirmaster at a Church of Central Africa congregation. He was also Vice-Secretary of the Nchanga Branch of Congress.
Independence struggle and presidency
In 1949 Kaunda entered politics and became the founding member of the Northern Rhodesian African National Congress. On 11 November 1953 he moved to Lusaka to take up the post of Secretary General of the Africa National Congress, under the presidency of Harry Nkumbula. The combined efforts of Kaunda and Nkumbula failed to mobilise native African peoples against the European-dominated Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. In 1955 Kaunda and Nkumbula were imprisoned for two months with hard labour for distributing subversive literature. The two leaders drifted apart as Nkumbula became increasingly influenced by white liberals and failing to defend indigenous Africans, Kaunda led a dissident group to Nkumbula that eventually broke with the ANC and founded his own party, the Zambian African National Congress in October 1958. ZANC was banned in March 1959 and Kaunda was sentenced to nine months' imprisonment, which he spent first in Lusaka, then in Salisbury.While Kaunda was in prison, Mainza Chona and other nationalists broke away from the ANC and, in October 1959, Chona became the first president of the United National Independence Party, the successor to ZANC. However, Chona did not see himself as the party's main founder. When Kaunda was released from prison in January 1960 he was elected president of UNIP. In 1960 he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta and afterwards, in July 1961, Kaunda organised a civil disobedience campaign in Northern Province, the so-called Cha-cha-cha campaign, which consisted largely of arson and obstructing significant roads. Kaunda subsequently ran as a UNIP candidate during the 1962 elections. This resulted in a UNIP–ANC Coalition government, with Kaunda as Minister of Local Government and Social Welfare. In January 1964, UNIP won the next major elections, defeating their ANC rivals and securing Kaunda's position as prime minister. On 24 October 1964 he became the first president of an independent Zambia, appointing Reuben Kamanga as his vice-president.
Educational policies
At the time of its independence, Zambia's modernisation process was far from complete. The nation's educational system was one of the most poorly developed in all of Britain's former colonies, and it had just a hundred university graduates and no more than 6,000 indigenous inhabitants with two years or more of secondary education. Because of this, Zambia had to invest heavily in education at all levels. Kaunda instituted a policy where all children, irrespective of their parents' ability to pay, were given free exercise books, pens, and pencils. The parents' main responsibility was to buy uniforms, pay a token "school fee" and ensure that the children attended school. This approach meant that the best pupils were promoted to achieve their best results, all the way from primary school to university level. Not every child could go to secondary school, for example, but those who did were well educated.The University of Zambia was opened in Lusaka in 1966, after Zambians all over the country had been encouraged to donate whatever they could afford towards its construction. Kaunda was appointed Chancellor and officiated at the first graduation ceremony in 1969. The main campus was situated on the Great East Road, while the medical campus was located at Ridgeway near the University Teaching Hospital. In 1979 another campus was established at the Zambia Institute of Technology in Kitwe. In 1988 the Kitwe campus was upgraded and renamed the Copperbelt University, offering business studies, industrial studies and environmental studies.
Other tertiary-level institutions established during Kaunda's era were vocationally focused and fell under the aegis of the Department of Technical Education and Vocational Training. They include the Evelyn Hone College and the Natural Resources Development College, the Northern Technical College at Ndola, the Livingstone Trades Training Institute in Livingstone, and teacher-training colleges.
Economic policies
Kaunda's newly independent government inherited a country with one of the most vibrant economies in sub-Saharan Africa, largely on account of its rich mineral deposits, albeit one that was largely under the control of foreign and multinational interests.For example, the British South Africa Company still retained commercial assets and mineral rights that it had acquired from a concession signed with the Litunga of Bulozi in 1890. Only by threatening to expropriate it on the eve of independence did Kaunda manage to get favourable concessions from the BSAC.
His ineptness at economic management blighted his country's development after independence. Despite having some of the finest farming land in Africa, Kaunda adopted the same socialist agricultural policies as Tanzania, with disastrous results.
Deciding on a planned economy, Zambia instituted a programme of national development, under the direction of the National Commission for Development Planning, which instituted a "Transitional Development Plan" and the "First National Development Plan". The two operations brought major investment in the infrastructure and manufacturing sectors. In April 1968, Kaunda initiated the Mulungushi Reforms, which sought to bring Zambia's foreign-owned corporations under national control under the Industrial Development Corporation. Over the subsequent years, a number of mining corporations were nationalised, although the country's banks, such as Barclays and Standard Chartered, remained foreign-owned. The Zambian economy suffered a setback from 1973, when rising oil prices and falling copper prices combined to reduce the state's income from the nationalised mines. The country fell into debt with the International Monetary Fund, and the Third National Development Plan had to be abandoned as crisis management replaced long-term planning. His weak attempts at economic reforms in the 1980s hastened Zambia's decline. A number of negotiations with the IMF followed, and by 1990 Kaunda was forced into partial privatisation of the state-owned corporations. The country's economic woes ultimately contributed to his fall from power.
One-party state and "African socialism"
In 1964, shortly before independence, violence broke out between supporters of the Lumpa Church, led by Alice Lenshina. Kaunda temporarily banned the church and ordered Lumpa's arrest.From 1964 onwards, Kaunda's government developed authoritarian characteristics. Becoming increasingly intolerant of opposition, Kaunda banned all parties except UNIP following violence during the 1968 elections. However, in early 1972, he faced a new threat in the form of Simon Kapwepwe's decision to leave UNIP and found a rival party, the United Progressive Party, which Kaunda immediately attempted to suppress. Next, he appointed the Chona Commission, which was set up under the chairmanship of Mainza Chona in February 1972. Chona's task was to make recommendations for a new Zambian constitution which would effectively reduce the nation to a one-party state. The commission's terms of reference did not permit it to discuss the possible faults of Kaunda's decision, but instead to concentrate on the practical details of the move to a one-party state. Finally, Kaunda neutralised Nkumbula by getting him to join UNIP and accept the Choma Declaration on 27 June 1973. The new constitution was formally promulgated on 25 August of that year. At the first elections under the new system held that December, Kaunda was the sole candidate.
After eliminating political opposition, Kenneth Kaunda established a personality cult and promoted a left nationalist-socialist ideology called Zambian Humanism. It combined mid-20th-century concepts of central planning and state control with values Kaunda described as traditional African principles, including mutual aid, trust, and community loyalty. The ideology has been criticized for showing similarities to fascism. Similar forms of African socialism were introduced in Ghana by Kwame Nkrumah and in Tanzania by Julius Nyerere. Kaunda wrote many books elaborating his ideology called Humanism in Zambia and a Guide to Its Implementation, Parts 1, 2 and 3. Other works on the subject include Timothy Kandeke’s Fundamentals of Zambian Humanism, Rev. Fr. Cleve Dillion-Malone’s Zambian Humanism, Religion and Social Morality, and Justin B. Zulu’s Zambian Humanism: Some Major Spiritual and Economic Challenges. In 1980 Kaunda also published Kaunda on Violence.
As president of UNIP, and under the country's one-party state system, Kaunda was the only candidate for president of the republic in the general elections of 1978, 1983, and 1988, each time with official results showing over 80 per cent of voters approving his candidacy. Parliamentary elections were also controlled by Kaunda. In the 1978 UNIP elections, Kaunda amended the party's constitution to bring in rules that invalidated the challengers' nominations: Kapwepwe was told he could not stand because only people who had been members for five years could be nominated to the presidency ; Nkumbula and a third contender, businessman Robert Chiluwe, were outmanoeuvred by introducing a new rule that said each candidate needed the signatures of 200 delegates from each province to back their candidacy.