It is almost 20 years to the day since I flew high above Africa, with a TV crew jammed into a bumpy light plane. It was a white-knuckle ride through clouds into the jaws of a military coup.
We woke on that October morning, in 1997, in Harare, to news of a military coup in neighboring Zambia. Given that Zambians are not exactly warlike people, this breakfast declaration by a group calling itself the National Redemption Council was startling. It was going to put in place a military junta to carry out live executions of traitors on TV.
The frontman was a Captain Solo – in real life Captain Steven Lungu of the Zambian army – who gave President Frederick Chiluba three hours to surrender, threatening bloody revenge to anyone who stood in his way.
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All commercial flights to Zambia were cancelled in the chaos. For me, it meant the first trauma of the day; we had to charter a flight from the aptly named Bush Pilots in Harare – the only people crazy enough to fly into a coup. The pilot was a young guy who looked like he should have been at school rather than flying a plane.
As we bumped through the clouds he wriggled in his seat and to my surprise brought out a box of cigarettes and lit one. On his first puff, the message came through the radio that the authorities had shut down the airport at Lusaka.
“I’ll have to drop you off in the bush near the border,” says the young man in the matter-of-fact voice of a taxi driver. I thought he was joking until we touched down in the middle of nowhere with game grazing nearby. The crew offloaded its ton of cameras, lights and microphones – there was no lightweight digital technology in those days.
I set off across the baked earth to a farmhouse a couple of kilometers away. I shouted until the farmer came out and asked if he could lend us his truck. I jumped on the back and minutes later I was riding to the rescue and waving through the heat’s haze, with a big smile on my face, to the crew standing like specks on the horizon.
Half an hour later we were cursing, sweating, and humping the kit through the crowded immigration hall at Chirundu. Then, the remaining 120km on foot? We had no choice but to stand on that towering steel semi-circle that is the Birchenough Bridge and hitchhike. Luckily three heavy lorries, in convoy, from South Africa stopped and took us on board one in each of the three cabs. By the time we got to Lusaka, the coup was over. It turned out to be more comic opera than dogs of war.
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It all started over a drink in the small hours in a Lusaka barracks. Captain Lungu and fellow officer Captain Jack Chiti sat complaining about the government and their grievances with the army. Just before dawn, in that way drunken people can do, they agreed to overthrow the government. The two captains went into the barracks, woke their men and told them to fire up the armoured vehicles. Most of them thought it was an exercise; but as they smashed through the gates of the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation (ZNBC) most of the soldiers saw the coup attempt for what it was and pressed on. No doubt, a number saw themselves as ministers and generals under the new regime. Within the hour they had taken over the ZNBC and Captain Solo began broadcasting threats.
The crackdown was swift. Loyal government soldiers, armed to the teeth, invaded ZNBC and sent the coup plotters scattering. The biggest problem, one of the soldiers told me afterwards, was winkling out the once brave, now terrified, soldiers of the coup. Apparently, many of them hid in cupboards at the ZNBC and it took a long time to find them.
As for Captain Lungu, soldiers slapped him out of the broadcasting station with his hands up. He ended up in that position so familiar to coup plotters; pinned to the ground with an army boot on his throat. The Zambian Information Service gleefully gave us the pictures of this.
The trial took years. The court sentenced Captain Lungu to death in 2003; he appealed and was handed 20 years in prison. Former President Rupiah Banda granted him pardon in 2010 and he eked out an impoverished life until he died two years later, aged 50, of TB. Captain Chiti was also freed and died of cancer, in August 2004, in a Lusaka hospital.
Both men suffered sad, lonely ends in return for their few hours of power; a short-lived, bungled and, thankfully bloodless, coup that is a mere footnote in Zambia’s history.

The Hell Ride To A Comical Coup

There can’t be too many days when you start work climbing down a ladder, with a government spy, into a dingy underground shaft in search of a torture chamber. This was how the meandering road of journalism took me to tunnels and bunkers deep beneath Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, on a sunny day in September 1995.
A few hours earlier I had been sitting at the presidential palace with the diminutive former President Frederick Chiluba. He assured me, with his peculiar trademark expression of rolling his eyes so all you could see was their whites, that we would see shocking evidence of torture in the days of his predecessor Kenneth Kaunda.
At the time, Kaunda had been a thorn in the side of Chiluba and was staging a political comeback. To give Chiluba his due, the union leader had ousted Kaunda, fair and square, at elections on a wave of votes of people fed up with food shortages and autocratic tendencies from the old man. It ended Kaunda’s 27-year reign since the day Zambia won independence on October 24, 1964. KK or Super Ken, as they called him in the copper belt, was determined to fight back at the 1996 elections and was going to wring out every bit of popularity he had as well as making a nuisance of himself to the people in power.
<div id="attachment_3519" style="width: 215px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-3519" class="size-medium wp-image-3519" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Par1766006-1-205x300.jpg" alt="" width="205" height="300" />Zambia&#8217;s former president Frederick Chiluba gives the thumbs up outside the Magistrates Courts on Febrauary 15, 2008 in Lusaka after the court ruled today that Chiluba should face a corruption trial in May. Chiluba would have to show cause why he should not be convicted on charges of theft of public funds and abuse of office, prosecutor Mutembo Nchito told AFP after the ruling by Lusaka Magistrate Jones Chinyama.</div>
In response, Chiluba threw mud at Kaunda from every angle. He tried to deport the old man to Malawi with a bizarre claim that the former head of state was not a Zambian – his father, a Church of Scotland vicar, was born in Malawi. In 1998, there was a misprision of treason trial where Kaunda was charged with failing to inform authorities of a treasonous act. Kaunda, who spent nine months in prison during the independence struggle, was to spend many more months behind bars on remand and grew a bushy Father Christmas white beard in protest. Appropriate, since he was arrested on Christmas Day.
“These are frightened little men trying to hurt me,” was one of Kaunda’s phrases of the time.
This was the scene on the surface on that day I walked into the dim tunnels built by engineers from the former Yugoslavia in the days when Lusaka was under attack for sheltering guerrillas from neighboring Zimbabwe and South Africa.
It was a bit like walking down a mine as the shaft led downward, in a gentle incline. There were lights here and there perched in the rock; every now and then there was a room off the main tunnel. We had the camera ready to get shots of the torture chamber; we found… nothing. If there was a torture chamber it was well hidden.
We scoured the underground bunkers and all we found was a radio station with a five-kilowatt transmitter, lots of damp carpets and rotting wood, what looked like a council chamber and rooms filled with bunk beds; little else.
We emerged at the other end of the long tunnel, which came out at the presidential palace, puzzled. Why had Chiluba sent us on a wild-goose chase? There was anecdotal evidence from a Major Ronald Chansa who told of being held and tortured in the tunnels for 21 days in 1981.
Afterwards, we headed for Kaunda’s home in Lusaka to ask the question about torture.
“If I see a spider in the bath I will take it out before I put my water there,” says Kaunda in denying the charge.
“Maybe there were one or two over-zealous policeman, here and there, but I can say I know nothing of torture.”
Maybe.
Chiluba faced corruption charges after his term in office and died in June 2011. Chansa, if there was such a man, never spoke out again. Kaunda, who famously grabbed the microphone to make a tribute at Nelson Mandela’s funeral in December 2013, is alive and well, living in Lusaka. He pulled out of the 1996 election at the last minute and never stood again and was acquitted of misprision of treason.
Maybe between the three, lies the truth about the bunkers deep below Lusaka.
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