Socialist Party Leader Fred M’membe Has Been Arrested Numerous Times by Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema. He Received the Helicopters As a Reward for Allowing U.S. Corporations to Plunder Zambia’s Copper Wealth
The Biden administration has gifted Zambia with four state-of-the-art high-performance Bell helicopters, valued at approximately $80 million (1.5 billion kwacha), alongside a comprehensive three-year training program for staff.
The announcement was made by United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) Commander General Michael Langley during an Africa senior leaders conference in which General Langley and Zambian military commanders discussed ways in which they would strengthen the U.S.-Zambian security partnership.
Officially, the new helicopters are supposed to be used in international peacekeeping, disaster relief, and to help avert conflict in neighboring African countries.
However, the helicopters may be used to repress Zambia’s Socialist Party (SP), which has been targeted in a campaign of repression by the ruling United Party for National Development (UPND).
The latter is closely aligned with the United States, enacting economic policies that favor U.S. corporate investors in Zambia’s mining sector.
Zambia is a leading producer of copper, a crucial metal in the transition to a clean energy economy, which is a key electrical conductor and component for solar and wind power plants, electric vehicles and batteries, and energy-efficient buildings. Zambia is also rich in lithium, cobalt and manganese.
Rising global copper prices have fueled a bonanza of foreign investment in Zambia. At the U.S.-Africa Summit in Washington last December, U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo announced 14 deals worth about $15 billion, far more than what was committed during the U.S.-Africa Summit of 2014.
The Lusaka Times reported that a U.S.-based company, KoBold Metals, in one of those deals, was investing $150 million in mining exploration and develolpment in the Copperbelt (Kitwe).
The Vancouver-based First Quantum Minerals, which owns 80% of the massive Kansanshi copper mine outside Solwezi, is also planning a $1.25 billion expansion. Its shareholders include J.P. Morgan Chase, the L.A.-based Capital Group, and Blackrock, one of the world’s largest asset management firms and a major donor to the Democratic Party.
Reversing an attempt by his predecessor, Edgar Lungu, to nationalize portions of the mining sector, UNDP leader Hakainde Hichilema gave Zambia’s copper mines a de facto tax holiday after his election in August 2021 by making the mineral royalty tax (MRT) a tax-deductible expense for purposes of computing corporate tax.
Hichilema is a millionaire cattle rancher who profited from corrupt privatization schemes in the 1990s. He was listed in the Paradise Papers, leaked documents exposing politicians that used tax havens, as the owner of AfNat Resources Ltd., which explored for nickel and other metals in Zambia.[1]
In 2020, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)—an off-shoot of the CIA—spent $313,000 in Zambia to finance civil society groups that may have included some of Hichilema’s supporters. Then in 2021, the NED provided $601,025 in grants, including to bloggers supportive of Hichilema and opposed to Edgar Lungu in the 2021 election.
According to Sean Tembo, writing in The Zambian Observer, the effect of Hichilema’s tax holiday is that “the little which the mines used to pay [in taxes] previously has now further been diminished. The President’s argument is that the tax holidays will attract more investment into the mining sector. But what about the Zambian people? When are they going to begin to benefit from their minerals?”
Currently, 60% of Zambia’s 16 million people live below the poverty line and earn less than $1.90 per day. Zambia stands as the fifth hungriest nation in the world after the Central African Republic, Chad, Madagascar and Yemen.
In 2011, after the Lusaka High Court ordered London-based Vedanta Resources and one of its subsidiaries to pay $1.4 million to residents in Chingola because sulphuric acid and other chemicals spilled into the Kafue River, the judge stated that Zambians “should not be dehumanized by greed and crude capitalism which put profit above human life.”
Unfortunately, as of this moment, this is precisely what is happening. Leo Mulenga, a 65-year-old Copperbelt resident said in 2015: “We used to grow cabbages, potatoes, tomatoes and bananas but now, there’s no future here—only poverty and suffering for everyone because this land is damaged and spoiled [due to the greed of the mining companies and Wall Street banks that own them].”
Campaign of Repression Against the Socialists
As noted, Hichilema’s pro-corporate policies have coincided with a mounting campaign of repression targeting the SP, which has developed a progressive manifesto pledging to reverse Zambia’s slide into privatization and de-industrialization—which has damaged social life.
When the Socialist Party ruled Zambia from 1964 to 1991 under founding father Kenneth Kaunda, the copper mines were nationalized and state revenues were used to develop the country’s economy and to provide social services to the people, including free education and health services and agricultural subsidies.[2] For a brief period Zambia’s economy flourished, with its GDP catching up to that of Portugal.
The current leader of Zambia’s SP, Dr. Fred M’membe, was arrested in late August and charged with inciting political violence in Serenje when members of the SP were attacked by UNPD thugs during a political rally—fitting a precedent of UNPD-instigated violence in other towns.
M’membe was also charged with unlawful discharge of a firearm, though he said that he fired shots into the air to disperse the unruly mob that had attacked SP cadres.
After he was arrested, M’membe said that two other SP leaders from Lusaka Central were arrested for simply arriving at the police station to show support for him.
M’membe said after his arrest that “[Hichilema] is destroying this country with tribalism like we have never seen before, with very high corruption…we are seeing an increasing abuse of police [powers]…Every regime in this country that has attempted to use the police for politics has failed, Hichilema is no exception.”
Two weeks before his arrest on incitement of violence and gun charges, M’membe had been arrested on libel charges, accused of the “offense of communication of certain information contrary to Zambian law” and “intent to defame the Deputy Inspector General of Police.”
Graphael Musamba, the Inspector General of the Zambian Police, said statements made by M’membe that were “published in some tabloids and various social media platforms” were “inclined at nothing but inciting the peace loving people of Zambia so that they lapse into civil disobedience in order for them to gain scarce political mileage.”
Musamba went on to threaten that “the Zambia Police Service has an obligation to defend the constitution at any cost and that it will do, even if it takes some stern measures such as smashing the rebellion which we know is carefully being instigated by [the] Socialist Party…As a reminder to the Socialist Party, if you check the history of this country, people with frivolous dreams such as yours have been defeated.”
M’membe responded to the Police Inspector General’s comments by writing that “the Zambian people already know the suffering they are facing under Mr. Hichilema’s one-term regime. Let Mr. Hichilema know that the Zambian people don’t need anyone to incite them; they are fully awake to the suffering he has put them through so far….What is likely to incite Zambians is the hunger and untold suffering they are being subjected to as their President continues to work very hard to serve imperialists and transnational corporations. What has caused Zambians to lose faith and confidence in Mr. Hichilema and his far-right UPND government are the gross inequalities and injustices that Mr. Hichilema is reinforcing and then commanding his Inspector General of Police to defend.”
In an article entitled “Hichilema: Zambia’s First Puppet President,” M’membe further denounced Hichilema for aligning Zambia with U.S. foreign policy positions despite the country having a tradition of non-alignment, including by recognizing Morocco’s colonization of Western Sahara and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians.
Within Zambia, M’membe wrote that, “as an example of how far he is willing to carry out the wishes of the imperialists and their institutions, Mr. Hichilema was commanded by the IMF to phase out subsidies on maize production. Expensive maize production will mean expensive mealie meal—a staple, which is not just food, but sits at the heart of our culture as Zambians. To take mealie meal out of the reach of a Zambian is no different to being ordered to point a gun at their head.”
In another article published on July 29, M’membe denounced the UPND administration’s two years in office as being “disastrous,” marked by the arrest of opponents and “selective justice,” and by the government being a “puppet of Western governments” by allowing an AFRICOM “office” in Lusaka, while backtracking on its promises.
M’membe added that “the problems this regime finds itself with today emanate from its own lies, deception, or simply put, unfulfilled promises and shameless puppetry by a President and regime eager to serve Western and transnational corporation interests at the expense of its own people, many of whom can now only dream of half a meal a day.”
These comments provide a strong rebuke to the neo-liberal economic paradigm advanced by Hichilema and his foreign sponsors intent on plundering Zambia’s mineral wealth. The vast inequality and social misery can only be advanced by ratcheting up state repression—which the shiny new helicopters should help facilitate.
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Hichilema’s career has long been supported by the Brenthurst Foundation—funded by the billionaire Oppenheimer family in South Africa—which has holdings in the De Beers and Anglo-American mining conglomerates. ↑
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Kaunda was a close friend of Julius Nyerere, Samora Machel, Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Abdel Nasser, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Fidel Castro, each of whom offered hope to oppressed peoples. The CIA plotted a coup against Kaunda in 1981, identifying his successor, Frederick Chiluba, who privatized Zambia’s copper mines and stole millions of dollars from the state treasury, as a promising future leader around that time. ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Left on Left.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of five books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), and Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
