By EditorZambia
The uproar surrounding President Hakainde Hichilema’s remarks at the Choma rally says far more about the anxieties of his critics than about the content or intent of his speech. What should have been received as a candid, mobilising address to supporters has instead been twisted into a manufactured controversy by those determined to read malice, exclusion, or danger into every word the President utters, especially when he speaks from Southern Province and in the Tonga language.
Let us begin with a basic democratic principle: a President of the Republic has every right—indeed a duty—to address citizens in all parts of the country and in languages they understand. Choma is not a forbidden zone. Southern Province is not a political ghetto. Tonga is not a substandard language of mobilisation. To suggest otherwise is to betray a deeply entrenched and uncomfortable hierarchy of political belonging, where some regions and languages are treated as “national” while others are merely tolerated. 
The outrage that President Hichilema dared to hold a rally in Choma, and worse still, spoke in Tonga, exposes a mindset that has long assumed that political legitimacy flows naturally from the North and East, preferably expressed in Bemba or Nyanja. That assumption is not patriotism; it is exclusion dressed up as convention. Zambia’s Constitution recognises no such linguistic or regional ranking, and neither should our politics.
Critics have also seized on the President’s self-description as the country’s “number one spy,” choosing to interpret a plainly metaphorical statement as something sinister. Yet in politics, awareness is not espionage; it is leadership. Is it wrong for a President to understand the strategies, contradictions, and manoeuvres of the opposition? Or are we now suggesting that effective political intelligence is a moral failing?
President Hichilema was making a simple point that: Bill 7 did not pass by accident. It passed because the UPND leadership anticipated resistance, engaged broadly, and persuaded Members of Parliament across party lines. That is not subversion; it is politics as it is practised in every functioning democracy. Ironically, many of those now feigning shock at this candour come from political traditions that perfected closed-door deals, arm-twisting, and intimidation, but rarely admitted it publicly.
History matters here. Long before Bill 7, Zambia witnessed the ruthless dismantling of regional political formations deemed inconvenient to those in power. The ANC, which enjoyed significant support in Southern Province, was effectively neutralised following the infamous Choma Declaration, an episode widely understood to have involved coercion and threats against Harry Mwaanga Nkumbula. That was not consensus-building; it was political suppression. Yet those who inherited the benefits of that era now posture as guardians of constitutional purity.
It is also worth recalling that alliances from the Zambezi region (Southern, Western and North-Western) have repeatedly faced coordinated resistance whenever they threatened to alter the national balance of power. This pattern did not begin with President Hichilema, nor will it end with him. What has changed is that, for the first time in decades, leadership from outside the traditionally dominant North/East blocs has not only emerged but consolidated power through the ballot.
Bill 7 became a convenient battleground for these unresolved tensions. Opponents cloaked their resistance in legal language, but the intensity and regional concentration of the backlash revealed something deeper: discomfort with a shifting political centre. The President’s explanation—that the Bill was driven by a desire to enhance women’s and youth representation—was barely engaged on its merits by many critics. Instead, his motives were questioned, his intelligence caricatured, and his language problematised.
The reaction to his Choma remarks fits this same pattern. When President Hichilema warned that his removal could trigger cycles of political vengeance, he was not issuing threats; he was reflecting on Zambia’s lived history. Our past transitions have too often been accompanied by retribution, purges, and selective justice. To acknowledge that risk is not to incite fear, but to urge caution and maturity.
Equally, his defence of the UPND’s economic record—on stabilisation, free education, and farmer payments—was conveniently ignored by those eager to isolate a single phrase and inflate it into scandal. That selective listening is not analysis; it is agenda.
Zambia’s democracy cannot mature if political debate continues to be filtered through unspoken assumptions about who is entitled to lead, where leadership may speak, and in which language legitimacy resides. President Hichilema’s Choma rally challenged those assumptions simply by existing. That is why it unsettled some observers.
The truth is straightforward. There was nothing unpardonable about Choma. There is nothing improper about Tonga. Nothing sinister about political awareness. The attempt to criminalise these realities says less about the President and more about the reluctance of certain political traditions to accept a Zambia that is genuinely plural, equal, and open.
History will likely remember the Choma rally not for the noise it generated, but for what it revealed: a nation still negotiating the meaning of inclusivity, and a President unafraid to speak plainly to his people, wherever they are, and in the language of their hearts.
