Zambia: Voting for Unity

Four years and two months from the day it finally won kwacha — freedom — Zambia last week held its first parliamentary election as a sovereign state.

To allow their people to vote, employers in urban centers — from store owners to white housewives — staggered working hours. Queues formed outside polling stations in the capital of Lusaka at daylight as people hurried to town. In rural areas, men and women went to the polling stations — in some in stances only coarse hemp wrapped around a square of gumpoles — through the jungle and bush and across plains flooded by heavy rains. They arrived by donkey, on bicycles, in wooden-wheeled oxcarts and World War I jalopies, or came clutching the sides of slim leaky boats hewn from tree trunks.

Misguided Mentor. The tramp of 1,000,000 eligible Zambians to the polls was indeed a stirring demonstration of what President Kenneth Kaunda calls "the cause of the common man." Although there were battles and at least 25 deaths in pre-election campaigning, Kaunda was determined that such internecine struggle should be ended after election day. "I have no doubt," he said, "that young Zambia will be one of those few countries to break the nasty record in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where post-independence elections have brought some kind of confusion."

Kaunda, certain of re-election as President, was actually being rather two-faced. To avoid confusion, the 44-year-old father of his country (and nine of its children) is utilizing the election to turn Zambia peaceably into a one-party state. The party, of course, is his own United National Independent Party.

Kaunda hoped last week to make the transformation at the polls democratically. Of the 105 parliamentary seats on the ballots, 30 are already held by unopposed U.N.I.P. members. Harry Nkumbula, who was once Kaunda's political tutor and whose African National Congress was his only real opposition, charged that his candidates were barred from filing for those seats. In addition, Nkumbula was rousted out of bed in Lusaka before dawn one morning while police searched his house for weapons. The ostensible reason was that thugs from Nkumbula's party rather than foreign intruders had been responsible for a series of raids along the Angola border in which 14 Zambian villages were burned. On television and in stump speeches, Kaunda in velvety tones accused his old mentor of having become "a misguided political adventurer."

Principle and Pocketbook. If Kaunda fails to arouse the nation to vote his ticket overwhelmingly, he intends to eliminate other parties by parliamentary means. The President is certain, when the new Parliament meets next month, of the two-thirds majority necessary for a constitutional amendment abolishing all parties except his own.