By EditorZambia
Dr. Sishuwa Sishuwa’s claim that Hakainde Hichilema “may well be the first and last Tonga-speaking President we will see in our lifetime because he has taught the other groups a lesson in proper ethnic entrenchment and exclusion” is not just provocative it’s dangerous. It’s the kind of framing that pulls a country backwards by manufacturing ethnic insecurity where none needs to exist.
Let us call things by their name. This idea that President Hichilema’s presidency has somehow become an ethnic cautionary tale is a myth wrapped in academic elegance. 
Strip that away and what remains is the same old fear politics Zambia has long outgrown.
President Hichilema did not become president to teach anybody a tribal lesson. He became president because he convinced millions of Zambians across tribes, classes, and provinces that the country could run better than it was.
That is the core truth people like Sishuwa conveniently skip.
It’s easier to insinuate ethnic consolidation than to acknowledge a simple democratic fact: voters wanted change.
If the President were truly running an exclusionist, tribal machine, you wouldn’t see the very regions that didn’t vote UPND in 2021 receiving the bulk of newly built clinics, roads, school desks, and teacher deployments.
You wouldn’t see a cabinet with national spread. You wouldn’t see decentralised CDF empowering constituencies without asking who voted for whom.
You wouldn’t see the State genuinely backing a merit-based civil service, something many past administrations didn’t bother with.
Here’s the blunt edge of it: the notion that President Hichilema’s presidency will scare off future Tonga-speaking leaders is only true if we allow dishonest narratives to define leadership potential.
When people keep repeating that a Tonga president is a “rare accident” of history, they are not analysing politics they are reinforcing the very prejudice they claim to critique.
The real danger is not President Hichilema’s presidency. The real danger is that intellectuals are misdiagnosing Zambia’s political dynamics and then exporting those misdiagnoses to the public as expert insight.
Zambia’s problem has never been that one ethnic group becomes too powerful. Zambia’s problem has always been leaders who manipulate ethnic anxieties to shield their own political failings.
When critics can not fault a president on substance, efficiency, or delivery, they reach for the oldest weapon in the book: tribe.
Let’s be honest. President Hichilema is being judged not as a leader but as a symbol. His successes are weaponised as “Tonga consolidation” while his failures are declared “proof of tribal entitlement.”
You can’t win under that framework. It’s designed to delegitimise before the scorecard is even read. This is where the rhetoric collapses under its own weight.
If President Hichilema performs well, shouldn’t that make it more likely not less that another Tonga-speaking leader can rise someday?
Isn’t that how democracy should work? You do the job well, and you expand opportunities for those who come after you.
The argument that President Hichilema has locked future Tonga leaders out of power says nothing about him and everything about the person making that argument.
It suggests that Zambians are inherently tribal in their voting behaviour and incapable of judging leaders individually.
That insult should anger every citizen, not just those from Southern Province.
Zambia is bigger than this narrative.
Our democracy is stronger than one academic’s pessimism. Our voters are smarter than fear-mongering disguised as analysis.
If President Hichilema becomes the last Tonga president, it won’t be because he governed tribally. It will be because we will have allowed loud voices to poison the political space with self-fulfilling prophecies.
Zambians should refuse such narrative because no tribe owns the presidency past, present, or future.
The only owners of that office are the citizens. All of them. Together.
