Post-populism in Zambia: Michael Sata’s rise, demise and legacy
| DOI | 10.1177/0192512117720809 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Author | Alastair Fraser |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512117720809
International Political Science Review
2017, Vol. 38(4) 456 –472
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0192512117720809
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Post-populism in Zambia: Michael
Sata’s rise, demise and legacy
Alastair Fraser
SOAS University of London, UK
Abstract
Models explaining populism as a policy response to the interests of the urban poor struggle to understand
the instability of populist mobilisations. A focus on political theatre is more helpful. This article extends the
debate on populist performance, showing how populists typically do not produce rehearsed performances
to passive audiences. In drawing ‘the people’ on stage they are forced to improvise. As a result, populist
performances are rarely sustained. The article describes the Zambian Patriotic Front’s (PF) theatrical
insurrection in 2006 and its evolution over the next decade. The PF’s populist aspect had faded by 2008 and
gradually disappeared in parallel with its leader Michael Sata’s ill-health and eventual death in 2014. The party
was nonetheless electorally successful. The article accounts for this evolution and describes a ‘post-populist’
legacy featuring of hyper-partisanship, violence and authoritarianism. Intolerance was justified in the populist
moment as a reflection of anger at inequality; it now floats free of any programme.
Keywords
Elections, populism, political theatre, Laclau, Zambia, Sata, Patriotic Front
Introduction
This article both contributes to the thin theoretic literature on ‘post-populism’ and develops an illus-
trative case. It discusses the explosive arrival of the Patriotic Front (PF) on the Zambian electoral
scene in 2006 and the party’s subsequent evolution. It examines how the PF has been framed as
populist by authors emphasising the policy orientation of rational actors operating in a political
marketplace, and argues that this framing stretches the concept beyond usefulness. It suggests that
the PF’s 2006 campaign can more sensibly be described as populist on the basis that it used political
theatre to construct antagonistic social identities. It thus extends Benjamin Moffitt’s (2016) analysis
of populism as political theatre by showing that populism often draws its audience, ‘the people’ on
stage. The resulting necessary improvisation of a leader’s performance can sharpen contradictions
inherent in populist mobilisations: theatrical illusions are difficult to sustain. This helps explain the
party’s inability to institutionalise, and its evolution from populism to authoritarianism. The article
Corresponding author:
Alastair Fraser, SOAS University of London, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London, WC1H 0XG, UK.
Email: af22@soas.ac.uk
720809IPS0010.1177/0192512117720809International Political Science ReviewFraser
research-article2017
Article
Fraser 457
also highlights the extent to which the PF’s populism became untenable because it was bound up
with the energetic and confrontational persona of the party’s founder, Michael Sata, a performance
he struggled to sustain.
While Sata won the presidency in 2011, and the PF retained power under Edgar Lungu, the
article suggests that the party’s populism mellowed immediately after the 2006 campaign and then
faded and disappeared in parallel with Sata’s ill-health and eventual death in 2014. This raises two
questions: how did the party increase its vote share even as its populism faded, and what does this
tell us about what comes after populist moments? The article directs attention to the ways Zambian
political celebrities mobilise clientelist networks, which frequently switch parties en masse. These
collective defections render implausible accounts of parties as outgrowths of citizens’ program-
matic preferences, economic interests or ethnic identities. As the PF took over urban representative
structures from 2006, and then won the presidency in 2011, contestation over the spoils of power
generated resentments, defections and violent confrontations within and between parties. This tur-
bulence reflected little more than the clashing ambitions of a set of political chameleons. The
article concludes that Zambia now experiences a ‘post-populist’ legacy. Hyper-partisanship and
violence, connected in the populist moment to unmet social needs, remain. An optimistic, future-
oriented project to meet those needs has dissipated, leaving popular cynicism and apathy and an
insecure, authoritarian ruling party.
A sketch of the PF’s history
Independent since 1964, Zambia’s economy has been dominated by the export of a single com-
modity (copper), the price of which is unstable. A debt crisis in the 1980s empowered Zambia’s
donors, whose influence supported domestic pressures for democratisation and economic liberali-
sation. After the peaceful departure of founding president Kenneth Kaunda and his United National
Independence Party (UNIP) in 1991, the Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) failed in its
first decade to deliver prosperity. Frederick Chiluba, the MMD’s trade unionist leader, clung to
power until 2001 by undermining democratic competition, demobilising the party’s urban and
labour support base and managing clientelist networks centred on the presidency.
Chiluba met his political end in the popular defeat of his bid for an unconstitutional third term.
When Levy Mwanawasa was appointed as Chiluba’s successor, Michael Sata – a veteran politician
with trade unionist roots similar to Chiluba’s – felt overlooked and left the MMD. He launched his
own party, the PF, just before the 2001 elections. With little time to organise, it won few votes.
Mwanawasa’s presidency saw comparatively fair multi-party competition. A liberalised media
enabled diverse voices to be heard and increasing mobile phone ownership allowed politicians to
build an unmediated dialogue with voters through call-in radio shows (Simutanyi et al., 2015).
Nonetheless, it was unclear that opposition parties could make much of these openings. Most chal-
lengers to the MMD since 1991 had been ‘big men’ who funded their own parties and used patron-
age rather than a programmatic appeal to stitch together regional voting blocs (Posner, 2005). Debt
dependence also played a role in Zambia’s ‘choiceless democracy’ as opposition parties internal-
ised IMF and World Bank policy preferences (Mkandawire, 1999). This is not to say that the
MMD’s opponents would, without donor incentives, have been radical: the most significant leader,
Anderson Mazoka of the United Party for National Development (UPND), was a former executive
of mining multinational Anglo-American. Indeed, in the post-Cold War world, ideologically-
coherent, mass-based, democratic parties are in short supply globally. As Peter Mair puts it, politics
had been ‘stripped of its popular component’ leaving ‘democracy without a demos’, in which, in
terms of voters’ attitudes towards their representatives, the ‘dividing line between indifference and
hostility is not always very pronounced’ (2006: 25). Zambia in the mid-2000s was in this sense ripe
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