By Chanda Chisala

President: I’ve canceled national mourning

Supporters: That’s a wise decision, thank you.

President: Oh wait. I didn’t actually cancel the national mourning. It will continue.

Supporters: That’s a wise decision, thank you.

President: We will take the amendment bill to parliament, we have already consulted enough people.

Supporters: Wise decision. The president is telling the truth.

President: Oh Wait. We have deferred the bill from parliament because we have not consulted enough people.

Supporters: The president is telling the truth. He will now consult the people. We told you he’s a listening president.

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One of the worst things you can do for your beloved leader is to unquestioningly praise everything they do and say. This doesn’t help them because it gives them a wrong sense of how well their ideas are working or being received, and it leads to that deadly condition of an emperor walking around with no clothes as his people praise his wonderful invisible garments!

In fact, it also makes the president lose respect for his own servile and obsequious followers. We can all remember seeing this lesson play out in front of our eyes when President Chiluba decided to disappoint all his loyal top leaders in MMD by choosing the outsider Levy Mwanawasa as his preferred successor. His loyal faithfuls who had supported every single thing he did, including his misguided attempt at changing the constitution to give himself a third term, were shocked that he chose the man they considered the most disloyal.

Mr Levy Mwanawasa had resigned as Vice President of the country because he disagreed with Chiluba’s handling of corruption allegations among his ministers. Although Chiluba was angry with this embarrassing act of defiance, it made him respect Mwanawasa more than any of his other ministers because it showed that he was more loyal to his principles than to any man, which shows character. When it was time for choosing a successor, most of the people he had grown to respect had already left the party, so he famously sent someone to wake Mwanawasa up in the middle of the night.

Ironically, this decision by Chiluba was apparently the first one Michael Sata expressed strong disagreement with, and it finally revealed his own leadership potential. Chiluba was shocked by Sata’s defiance because he never imagined that he had it in him to oppose any presidential decision. Within a short time, as president Mwanawasa turned against him, Chiluba became a supporter of Sata and his opposition Patriotic Front. Had Sata not finally expressed how he truly felt about a decision made by Chiluba, he would have remained a loyal pretender in the MMD and would have never fulfilled his own leadership potential.

There is nothing wrong with supporting your favorite president with great enthusiasm, or defending him against those who always attack everything he does. But in those times that you honestly think he is wrong or being misled, you owe it to your integrity to say it, so that even your statements of support can carry some weight. The worst thing you can do is to just switch off your brain and defend him even for decisions you find disturbing or confusing; you are only helping him fall into a ditch of self-delusion.

More importantly: you destroy your own mind when you support everything someone does (or automatically oppose everything someone does), without thinking seriously and honestly for yourself. It’s a betrayal of your own soul, an act of treason against reason.

The author, Chanda Chisala, is the Founder of Zambia Online and Khama Institute. He is formerly a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and Visiting Scholar to the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank at Stanford. He was also a Reagan Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/chandachisala