Right of reply: In defence of Zambia’s democracy:
With about a year to go before Zambia’s next elections, Dr Sishuwa Sishuwa has criticised President Hakainde Hichilema’s record, accusing the government of political interference.
Specifically, he accuses the president of secretly puppeteering the main opposition party; stacking the electoral commission against this same opposition; reshaping the courts in his image; and seeing his constitutional changes foiled by the judges he supposedly hand-picked.
By implying the government has seized control of the main opposition party, the Patriotic Front, he forgets that old political rule of thumb: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
The collapse of the Patriotic Front (PF) is the result of the natural end to a party that spent more than a decade failing to deliver for the Zambian people. Nor is it the first time the PF has collapsed into in-fighting; it happened after the death of president Michael Sata in 2014.
Zambia needs an organised, credible and focused opposition. But responsibility for this surely cannot fall on the government. Having suffered years of political repression under the PF, this administration is in the process of replacing the colonial-era Public Order Act with a more tolerant Public Gathering Act. Rather than blocking opposition meetings, as Sishuwa suggests, we are building a more vibrant and inclusive democratic space. Citizens once again feel free to wear party colours in the streets without the fear of political violence which stalked every bus shelter and market stall in the 2010s.
We also reject the insinuation that the government is attempting to undermine the independence of the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) by staffing it with party stooges. These allegations are based on conjecture while the professional record of Mrs Zaloumis, a former member of the National Constitutional Conference, and Mr Chipenzi, former chair of the Council of NGOs in Zambia, are plain for all to see.
Sishuwa criticises the ECZ’s attempts to register 3.5 million new voters as a bid to “prepare the public’s mind” for vote manipulation. The more obvious explanation would be trying to enfranchise more of Zambia’s young, growing population.
President Hichilema is accused of trying to stack the lower courts with political appointees. In reality, the three Constitutional Court judges who he sacked in October 2024 were dismissed after the Judicial Complaints Commission found irrefutable evidence of gross misconduct. The JCC’s advice is constitutionally binding, and the president replaced them with highly qualified justices, as is required by law.
The accusations of using the courts to gag opposition figures are equally unfounded. Hate speech, which is frequently tribal in nature, is a genuine problem in a country as diverse as Zambia and can lead to ethnic tensions and even violence if left unchecked. At the same time, the government recognises its role in defending freedom of expression, which is why we repealed the draconian “Defamation of the President Law” in 2022.
Despite facing various charges of hate speech, Socialist Party leader Fred M’membe and Tonse Alliance spokesperson Sean Tembo continue to campaign against the government freely and openly. Ironically, both men have reported government ministers to the police for alleged tribalist comments, suggesting that they do not entirely reject the premise for their arrests.
Finally, Sishuwa’s critique of the president’s attempts at constitutional reforms under Bill 7 are riddled with inaccuracies and rumour. Rather than a naked attempt at gerrymandering, the redrawing of constituency boundaries is a well overdue update to the last delimitation exercise, which occurred in 2011. Back then Zambia’s population was a little over 14 million; now it’s 21.9 million.
The creation of 55 new constituencies is made more urgent by the government’s decision to increase the Constituency Development Fund — the country’s main social security pot — from roughly $ 68,000 to $ 1.5 million per constituency. Without the creation of new electoral districts, many citizens will miss out on this funding.
Sishuwa also mischaracterises the clause in Bill 7 that prevents political parties from replacing their candidates if they are disqualified after nominations have closed. In the past, this quirk of Zambia’s Constitution has delayed important elections by weeks or even months, as fresh nominations are required even when a candidate has been found guilty of corruption. Such provisions are nowhere to be found in the constitutions of other democracies, including the US and South Africa.
Column inches and the modern attention span will not permit me to tackle any more of Sishuwa’s inaccuracies and half-truths. Government is a messy business and even the best leaders cannot get every call right. But Zambians have a lot to be proud of in their democracy in recent years. Peace and respect has returned to the public square. Corrupt officials have been brought to justice. The death penalty has been abolished, freedom of information laws introduced, and not a single media house has closed on our watch. All as we emerge, slowly but surely, from one of the worst economic crises in our nation’s history.
As the survivor of two fraudulent elections and a four-month prison term while in opposition, President Hichilema has always worked to strengthen Zambians’ democratic rights. As we look ahead to next year’s elections, the government hopes that more citizens than ever will get to exercise those rights freely and fairly.
Whitney Mulobela is the Zambian government’s chief communications strategist.
Chicago at 50: A musical that never loses its bite:
There’s a familiarity that’s part of the package when you sit down to watch Chicago, the musical that is now half a century old, tailored around its potent combination of sassy characters, sultry tunes and sexy dance numbers.
Several of its songs feel like old friends, including the opening number All That Jazz, which not only establishes the mood but, given the slickness with which it’s being performed in a new season of the show that’s opened in Cape Town, sends expectations sky-rocketing for two hours of effervescent entertainment.
A story that revolves around the sordid adventures of a couple of murderers seeking undue attention in Chicago’s jazz-fuelled Twenties might sound potentially heavy and harrowing, but the joy of the show is in the clever balancing of the underbelly of its rancorous characters with dark humour and downright steamy song-and-dance routines.
The resulting concoction is a spectacular guilty pleasure, perfectly poised at the intersection of bittersweet and utterly vicious.
It is, after all, a show that simultaneously condemns and makes a meal out of the double standards of the very same America that is right now being torn asunder by a president playing much the same game with the media and the public that the musical’s crafty killers engage in.
The creators of Chicago — composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb (the same duo who crafted New York, New York) wrote the songs, while Ebb fleshed out the story alongside celebrated choreographer and director Bob Fosse — understood the fun to be had from preying on the public’s lust for tawdry tales about dirty rotten scoundrels.
And they clearly knew enough about the thin line distinguishing good from evil to conjure up a slew of magnificent song-and-dance routines, all of them apparently impervious to the passage of time.
Chicago remains almost shockingly fresh. There’s the cheeky way that it glosses comedically over homicide, the manner in which it adds glamour and sex appeal to a women’s prison, and the sharp musicality it brings to the conspiratorial nature of criminal justice.
Its characters don’t simply argue their case before the law — they turn to the audience and wink, sharing the conceits of the cleverly crafted story in the form of lyrics that add poetry and whimsy to the more macabre, twisted components of the plot.
It is the story of killers getting away with murder because they manage to dazzle the public, trick the press and win over the jury with their camera-ready smiles and empathy-evoking stories. Oh, yes, and their dazzling good looks don’t hurt one bit, either.
In fact, they win us over, too. Of course they do.
I didn’t realise until now just how interactive Chicago was. By its very nature it vehemently dispenses with the illusion of a fourth wall, but during its recent opening-night performance in front of a full house in Cape Town, people were in their seats expressing their emotions out loud, so in thrall of what was unfolding on stage they could not resist participating, verbalising their awed delight.
Sat next to me, I had one friend — a huge fan of the show — who was so in her element she desperately wanted to sing along (she didn’t, but only because of my sideways glances).
On the other side, another friend — a Chicago virgin — was gasping out loud, not only at the sexiness of it all, but at the cleverness of the jokes, the ribald, the steamy naughtiness so tastefully done. And — perhaps more than anything — there were his alarmed exhalations of breath at the sheer professionalism and sparkle of the production.
Squashed between these two enthralled friends, and surrounded by such a receptive and genuinely captivated audience, I was unable to stop myself from dancing in my seat, rhythmically tapping my thigh.
I swayed considerably more than Jonathan Roxmouth, the golden-voiced charmer who, as the show’s first-class sleazeball, Billy Flynn, never deigned to really dance but with his velvety harmonising simply swept just about everyone off their feet, leaving the audience breathless.
There are towering performances across the board, in fact.
There’s Samantha Peo, who is as perky, quirky and dazzling as ever as she dishes up layer upon layer of wayward energy to deepen her Velma Kelly. And there’s a really stirring, sweetly melancholic performance of Mister Cellophane by Dean de Klerk, who plays the cuckolded and cluelessly soft-hearted husband of the show’s other headline-grabbing murderer, Roxie Hart, played by Kiruna-Lind Devar.
And there’s Tankiso Mamabolo as Matron Mama Morton, the devil-may-care prison warder who sings her way through When You’re Good To Mama as if it’s meant to be a verbal striptease.
Around Velma and Roxie, the story that’s spun is of a pair of murderers more concerned with personal notoriety (and the eventual spin-off vaudeville musical they’ll star in, thanks to their fame) than they are with winning their respective court cases, which might in fact see them hanged for their crimes.
More than anything, it’s the ensemble that got my juices fired up, though. The thrill of witnessing masterful choreography really takes flight as performers, who elsewhere in the show might only have a few cameo lines, get the chance to dance in ways that make the blood rise.
The ensemble brings such steamy, surrender-your-firstborn swagger to the stage that, as wonderful as the solo numbers and more intimate scenes are, it’s these energetic group numbers that remind you what it is to feel alive.
The shock for anyone who shows up to see Chicago for the first time is how clever and sophisticated it is. There is meaning hiding behind every smile and each sexily gyrated hip.
Nobody expects to encounter so much psychological depth lurking in a musical that sexily satirises a wayward justice system, nor to witness such emotionally powerful swipes made about prison suicide or the horrors of being a foreigner thrown into an American prison. But these are among the pertinent issues that are raised, and beautifully explored, in a show that’s so much more than rapturous spectacle.
Which means, too, that what we are seeing is more than merely a sexy bit of vaudevillian cleverness, but an actual song-and-dance ritual, a cast working through various questions of social injustice.
It’s highly palatable and watchable and quite beautiful, but it is nevertheless a reckoning, a dressing-down of the establishment. While we’re baptised in the razzle-dazzle and the rapture of the entertainment, we’re simultaneously made to resist being anaesthetised by it and instead feel the pull of its more provocative spirit.
It is a musical about bad people doing despicable things and by some ludicrous moral logic we applaud when they get away with murder. If that isn’t an honest reflection of something that’s wrong with society, what is?
Chicago’s citizens, like real-life Americans more broadly, are dazzled by the camera flashes and tearjerker tales concocted by its scheming protagonists, but the show is secretly admonishing us, reminding us to pay attention to the truth that’s simmering beneath the surface.
It wants to sensitise us, to hold a mirror to our own capacity to look the other way when the challenge is too hard and, hopefully, encourage us to be more dutiful as citizens of a society composed of human interactions.
It is a mesmerising show, full of the very razzle-dazzle its cast sings about, and it’s as reliable as ever as a reflection of the weirdness of the world we live in.
It’s also a shock to me that — a week after seeing the show — the songs continue to creep up on me, filling my head with vast and wonderful sequences, the strutting, pouting, sultry rhythms of the dance numbers taking over my mind’s eye so I can almost feel the seductive power of the dancers’ taut bodies seeping into every cell of my own.
That’s not just showbiz, baby — that’s art.
Chicago is on at Artscape Opera House in Cape Town until 28 September and Montecasino’s Teatro in Johannesburg from 3 October.
Morero grilled in parliamentary portfolio committee over Joburg’s water crisis:
Johannesburg is “fast approaching Day Zero” and the City of Johannesburg and its mayor, Dada Morero, have not done enough to communicate that urgency to residents.
This was the warning from Malebo Kobe, a member of the parliamentary portfolio committee on water and sanitation, where Morero appeared on Friday to explain his plans to tackle the city’s worsening water crisis.
“Just last week, the mayor promised the residents of Coronationville and Westbury that they will receive water in seven days,” Kobe told the virtual meeting. “That hasn’t happened yet. I would like an explanation from the mayor on why he would make such a promise, especially given that our issues are so complex.
“We know that the issues of infrastructure are much more prolonged than that; they are protracted in nature and you can’t make short-term promises.”
This was a huge concern for her. “It shows that we have a problem with communicating the realities to our people.”
The mayor has since revised his seven-day restoration deadline to three weeks.
In response, Morero said his seven-day restoration promise was to “provide hope” and signify leadership to these communities. “When we went to Westbury seven days ago, there was absolutely no water, which meant certain interventions had to be taken by the leadership of the city and decisive decisions had to be made.
“Out of the decisions we made was that in seven days we should ensure that the broader part of the area receives water. That’s a commitment that the government should be able to make, which means working with Johannesburg Water to ensure that water is supplied.
“A day after we left the area, we started realising an improvement as far as the supply of water in the area. Between the seven days that we have committed, there was a lot of improvement and that was experienced by the communities.”
Morero said that on Thursday, in a public meeting with residents from Westbury and Coronationville, “they did confirm that indeed improvements were witnessed. That is why there were no more protests in the area, precisely because leadership had confronted the problem and brought about solutions in the area …”
“We had to make certain decisions to ensure that we push our departments and our entities to respond … It was an important statement to have been made by the executive mayor, otherwise leadership can’t just sit and not make decisive decisions.”
Regarding Kobe’s statement on the city fast approaching Day Zero, Morero said that with summer approaching, “we are going to see high consumption” and “therefore we have to implement certain measures including level one restrictions to ensure that we can push consumption down”. He added that Johannesburg Water does communicate on a daily basis with residents.
Sufficient water being provided
The underlying causes of the water supply disruptions that are being experienced in Gauteng, in Johannesburg in particular, is that the demand for treated water from Rand Water by provincial municipalities is now sometimes exceeding the available supply, said Sean Phillips, the director-general of the department of water and sanitation.
“The demand supply relationship is very tight. This makes the system vulnerable to disruptions and when such disruptions occur, it takes a very long time for the water levels in the reservoirs to recover.”
Rand Water is supplying sufficient water to Gauteng municipalities to meet their needs, he said. “If they were to reduce the leaks in their distribution systems and invest more in their distribution infrastructure, including storage and pumping capacity.
All the municipalities in Gauteng need to focus on reducing their leaks. “The leaks, on average in the Gauteng municipalities, are about 33%, including in Johannesburg. That means that about a third of the water that they obtain from Rand Water is lost through leaks in the distribution system.”
Municipalities also need to invest in their distribution infrastructure, including storage and pumping capacity, so that their distribution systems are more resilient and not so prone to water supply disruption such as electrical supply disruption, “which will always occur”.
Institutional reform is required, Phillips said. The council of the City of Johannesburg has approved a water and sanitation turnaround plan, as required by the treasury’s reform of metropolitan trading services programme.
“We’ve assessed that plan, we think that it’s a very good quality turnaround plan, it’s appropriate, it contains everything that needs to be done to address the situation. And, if the plan is implemented, it will result in the required improvement in water and sanitation service delivery in the city,” he said.
The plan includes measures to improve operations and maintenance, including in improving leak repair as well as ambitious plans for capital investment in municipal distribution infrastructure, including the required additional storage and pumping capacity.
“We were very encouraged that Johannesburg Water was allocated an increased budget by the city to implement the plan and that it appointed contractors to work on the key projects related to strengthening the distribution infrastructure in the city.
“However, we are concerned that many of the projects have since come to a halt, and some of the contractors have stopped work or left the site because they have not been paid by Johannesburg Water. This is because Johannesburg Water does not have the money to pay them because part of its budget has been swept from its account by the city and not put back.”
R4 billion siphoned away
Stephen Moore, a member of the parliamentary portfolio committee, questioned Morero on media reports and Morero’s own comments that refer to an amount of R4 billion that was taken from Johannesburg Water and siphoned into municipal coffers “at this critical time when the city is facing a water crisis”.
“Please can you elaborate on why it was taken from Johannesburg Water and specifically what other expenses were deemed more important than communities without water for weeks at a time? Under what mechanism was the money reallocated?”
Moore referred to Johannesburg Water’s annual report of 2023-24, which indicated that cash flow restrictions in the city affected the entity’s ability to pay creditors on time. “As of 30 June 2024, creditors totalling R1.1 billion were not paid due to these restrictions. This cash flow restriction has had a direct impact on communities including the Commando system where the Brixton tower and reservoir project was all due to be completed in April.
“I was on site at the end of August and they say they’ve failed to be paid again, so they downed tools again. So this critical project that is aimed at assisting the Commando system is down again. Why are there currently problems in the City of Johannesburg with paying contractors and is this directly linked to the money taken away from the City of Johannesburg’s accounts.”
He said he understood that a partial payment on this item had been made “but that doesn’t account for why they weren’t paid in the first place”.
“I’ve looked through Johannesburg Water’s plans to turn this situation around and I’m confident that given the resources, Johannesburg Water is capable of addressing this crisis,” Moore said. “However, looking at the medium term budget framework for the next three years, the allocation is insufficient to turn around the city’s problems in the short term.
He said that less than R2 billion is allocated a year for the next three years while the entity needs about R3.2 billion a year “to start rectifying the neglect”.
“In fact, in the current year, the budget is only around R1.7 billion, which is an increase from R1.2 billion but it shows how little priority this issue has had historically. Even now it’s barely more than half of what is required to actually turn around the issue.”
To properly maintain the city’s 12 000km of water reticulation one needs to be repairing 240km to 300km of pipes every single year. “In the current budget you’re only intending to replace 85km of pipeline.”
Moore asked Morero to explain whether the turnaround plan would really assist in getting Johannesburg out of this crisis “or whether this plan is similar to your promises to the residents of the Commando system of a permanent solution within a week and now that that time is up you’re going to come back and say you need more time and more promises”.
Morero said that with the service entity reforms that the city has entered into with the treasury, they are “beginning to rearrange how we are financing entities and how we are financing infrastructure in the metro of Johannesburg”. This involves ring-fencing some revenue from water and electricity to reinvest it into those services.
He acknowledged that the city was unable to pay all its contractors on time. “We’ve got a war room that sits every Sunday to determine how best we can deal with payment of our suppliers. We are alive to the fact that our expenditure has actually exceeded our income.”
That the city was not allowing contractors to be paid was “digging us into a worse situation”, Moore said. “He [Morero] talks about pushing level one restrictions. Those water restrictions have been in place for over a decade, and are nothing new … Demand is going to rise with the summer heat.”
He said Johannesburg Water is doing an admirable job of trying to throttle and balance water for residents but not succeeding “and it’s only going to get hotter in Gauteng, which means that there’s going to be less water, higher demand and the same amount of supply. More people are going to be without water.
“The communities like Westbury and Coronationville and Sophiatown and Ebony Park and Bruma are going to go without water again. One has to question what problems exist in the background that are preventing the city from actually tackling this crisis properly and whether the right hands are behind the wheel.”
Morero said: “On the payment of contractors, we are doing that. We will check how many are outstanding, especially on critical projects with Johannesburg Water and we will prioritise those.”
He explained that after paying salaries, medical aid and its bulk purchases such as water and electricity while contractors were third in line. “We will go back and look at what is the pressure point at Johannesburg Water and prioritise those so that we can pay them immediately.”
This did not satisfy Leon Basson, the chairperson of the portfolio committee. “That means that contractors will stand last in a row. It doesn’t matter whether they go bankrupt because you are not prioritising them, you’ve signed a contract with them … You will pay them within 30 days, or when they give their letter.
“But then you take a decision as the metro to pay them when you’ve got cash. That is unacceptable and I will ask national treasury and the auditor general to investigate this because you are setting up contractors for failure that you’ve appointed.”
Basson said that Morero had not answered his question on when the R4 billion “that you have taken” and “when are you going to pay that back”.
“Surely with the crisis you have, it’s a council resolution. I’ve been a councillor for 18 and a half years in the municipality. I know how it works. You take that to your council. You ringfence that. It is not rocket science.
“You are not serious about the problem of the water in Johannesburg. And you need to come out clear how you are going to deal with it. I want dates from you, don’t tell me what you are going to do in future. I need to know when you are going to do this.”
Morero said he would ringfence the percentages that need to be reinvested into the city’s entities, like Johannesburg Water, at a “pace and scale that the city can afford”.
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