The pathology of power in Zambia: How citizens can reclaim their clout

Just as minibus taxi passengers allow themselves to be bullied by the driver and his minion, citizens allow themselves to be dominated by a villainous minority

By Sishuwa Sishuwa

Growing up in Zambia, I often traveled by minibus, the main mode of public transport. I was always amazed at — and quite ashamed about doing nothing about it — the way the conductor, the “call boy” in common parlance, would collaborate with the driver to terrorize an entire busload of adults. The two villains had the power of monarchs over everybody at the minibus stations and in the buses.

The situation was worse during the rush hour when workers were either going to or returning from work. With buses in short supply, people struggled to get into whatever moveable assemblage of machinery passed for a vehicle. The historical humiliation suffered by many Zambians at the hands of minibus drivers and call boys would make for a good PhD study!

The question that bothered me then, and still does now, is how does it come to pass that physically fit and mentally sound adults would cower before a young, scruffy call boy simply because of his official role? As for women and girls, the abuse that was heaped upon them by this breed of lower-end workers was simply abominable.

Occasionally, a passenger would rant against either the driver or the conductor. But they were the exception rather than the rule. Typically, the passengers cowered before those two — the driver and his conductor were the lords of the bus.

Today, as an adult, I have, I think, acquired some measure of understanding of why and how many people chose to be abused and intimidated by minibus drivers and their conductors. It is due to the simple fact that each person got onto the minibus as an individual — one who could never be sure of the solidarity of the other passengers in the event of a tussle with the driver and conductor.

On the other hand, the conductor could almost always be sure of the full support of the driver. He knew very well that the driver could easily offload any passenger who refused to do his bidding. He knew too that whatever extra money he made by overloading the bus would be split between the two of them, with the driver getting the lion’s share, of course.

However, the passengers — who were many and had more money between them than the driver and his conductor — because they had boarded the minibus as individuals, and did not care to gang up against the driver and conductor, ended up with no power over them. Thus, it came to pass that those two individuals, the minibus driver and his call boy, oppressed and abused the majority, who collectively had more financial and other clout than them, precisely because the two acted as a team.

Over time, the drivers and their call boys came to regard themselves as having power over their passengers, and passengers came to accept their lot as individuals pleading for a seat in a minibus administered by the pair. And no one would question this strange, lopsided and quite false distribution of power.

In fact, passengers would support the driver and his callboy in the abuse and oppression of fellow passengers by aiding in instructing others to squeeze themselves into horribly uncomfortable positions as the minibus was packed beyond the legal limit. This usually happened when someone was late and would selfishly force other passengers to “move” so that they too could board the overloaded bus.

In the minibus industry, the real power (money) is in the hands of passengers. If all potential passengers decided not to board minibuses, the industry would collapse. The minibuses move around and make money only because there are people who decide to use them as a means of transport. Inside the minibus, real social power is in the hands of the passengers — as a collective, not as individuals.

Passengers in any fully occupied minibus, acting in unison, could easily control the driver and his callboy. They have, when they choose to act as a collective, more physical, psychological and cultural power over the driver and the call boy than the pair have over them.

It is the passengers’ lack of awareness of their superiority, in both monetary and physical terms, and unwillingness to act as a collective, that produces this illusion of the superiority and power of the driver and call boy. The pair suffer from a mental and spiritual disease occasioned by a false sense of power. They have no real power over the passengers. It is the passengers who, unwittingly, have transferred their collective power to these two villains.

It is not too difficult to see how similar laws operate when one considers the situation in many countries today. Let us, for a moment, imagine Zambia as a minibus. Our money would be the vote. The minibus driver would be the president. The call boy would be the political party in power. The passengers are the citizens of Zambia.

When we choose to travel in any minibus, we actually decide at that moment to be “citizens” of that bus, and to “vote” for that bus’s driver to be our “president”, for the time that we are traveling to our destination. The call boy of the minibus we choose to travel in is the “political party” that organizes us inside the bus as “citizens”.

The driver and call boy are on their best persuasive behavior when they are seeking passengers (votes). As soon as the minibus is full, the balance of power shifts. If we choose to act as individuals inside the minibus (our country), the political party in power (the call boy) and the president (the driver) will abuse and oppress us all at will.

In fact, if we allow the callboy (political party) to overload (extreme oppression) the minibus (country), it might crash (conflict or civil war) and many could die, including the driver and his call boy (president and his party)!

Inside the bus, just like inside our country, what keeps the majority of people, who have the real power, in their condition of powerlessness, abuse and oppression by a villainous minority is their inability to act as a collective, in solidarity with each other.

Thus, the pathology of power is perpetuated — those who actually have no power act and live as if they do have it and those who have real power act and behave as if they are powerless. Oppression and abuse are sustained by this perverse, inverted logic.

Of course, vast protective trenches are dug by those who pretend to have power when, in reality, they are the powerless ones: they exploit the media; invoke culture and tradition; call upon the gods and generally weave a complex false consciousness of power.

These powerless people create titles and big labels for themselves — Majesties, Excellencies, Lords, Honourable this or that etc — in their effort to hoodwink the masses, in whom real economic and political power resides, into being obedient to them.

They manufacture a language and a manner which conveys this sense of false power. And precisely because those with real power — the masses — continue to act, by and large, as individuals, these villains continue to lord it over them.

Besides the family, schools, churches, prisons and hospitals, there are the police, army, intelligence establishment and all sorts of other institutions to enforce this false power over those who actually wield the power in society.

To claim the right to use this infrastructure of force in society, these powerless people need a “constitution” to spell out why, how and when they can use force to compel those with real power to behave as the powerless wish. For example, in the minibus, there is a silent, unwritten constitution which distributes “power” between the driver and his call boy and the passengers. Of course, the first article of this constitution is that you should never enter the minibus if you have no money to pay for the ride.

How, then, can the passengers liberate themselves from the abuse and oppression they receive at the hands of the driver and his call boy? As in any country, the first step is to understand where actual power resides — in the driver and his call boy or the passengers? The obvious answer is in the passengers.

The second step is to grow this awareness of power among the passengers and to mobilize solidarity among them. The third and final step is the need for the passengers to cast away the fear of the oppressive and abusive villainous minority.

When these three conditions are met — knowledge of where real power lies, mobilization of solidarity, and casting away the veil of fear of the oppressors — then, and only then, the liberation of the oppressed can take place. At this point, the abused and oppressed are ready to reclaim their power from the villains.

And, at this point, a completely new Constitution can be written — one which transfers power to its rightful owners — the citizens.

In Zambia today, most of us appear to be content to be abused and oppressed by a tiny minority. As long as this situation continues, we are not ready to reclaim our power from the villains.