It is just a little over a year since George Kunda, Zambia’s Vice President from 2008 to 2011, passed on. Many will remember him for speaking in capital letters but those that knew him even closer and intimately will remember him for not just being a brilliant lawyer but a good carpenter as well. Yes GK, as some of his peers would refer to him, was a carpenter, and a good one at that according to his son Howard. The Kunda homestead in Lusaka’s new Kasama tells it all. You may not notice when you get there but the man people only knew as a lawyer had put up an elaborate carpentry workshop as curving wood was his lifetime passion.
Irene Kunda, the widow, and her children did not want to be alone in remembering their loved one for they knew that the late George Kunda was also a friend and colleague to many. For this reason a remembrance church service was held on Saturday April 20, 2013 at the Mary Immaculate Catholic church in Lusaka.
Former President Rupiah Banda, his wife Thandiwe, Movement for Multi-Party Democracy, MMD, president Nevers Mumba, United Liberal Party, ULP, president Sakwiba Sikota and Douglas Siakalima special advisor to the United Party for National Development, UPND, president Hakainde Hichilema were in attendance. Others were high court judges, Dominic Sichinga, Chalwe Muchenga and Nigel Mutuna. There were also other people from all walks of life including members of the legal fraternity, politicians, businessmen and the clergy.
The remembrance church service lasted a little over an hour and was followed by the unveiling of the tomb by Mrs. Kunda, children and grandchildren at the Leopards Hill Memorial Park. It was here that former president Rupiah Banda, MMD president Nevers Mumba, ULP president Sakwiba Sikota and Douglas Siakalima from the UPND all paid glowing tribute to a man they all associated with in one way or the other.
For Rupiah Banda, George Kunda was a man he worked with very closely, a man who deputised him as vice president and he said, “You know it is not easy when you are one man and you have to choose the one person that you can trust implicitly, that you can sleep in peace and feel that he is there in case anything happens to me or if I have to travel out that I can trust this man completely with the thirteen million people of Zambia under his care.”
The former president continued, “When it was my turn to choose someone to be my vice president, I then realised how difficult it was because as you know I was new, I came from outside. I was invited by that great man the late president Mwanawasa to join him as his vice president and there I was presented with colleagues to work with. In a way I am very happy that I became president at the time when I had the whole cabinet in front of me, I had the whole civil service, I had the whole population of Zambia to assist me in achieving what everybody attributes to me. But all of us as a team, we worked together. I found a great team when I came and in that team was this man that I was not able to witness his burial because I was at Boston University at the time in the United States. I couldn’t come as my sponsors were not able to send me back. But today is a great day for me and my wife and my family to be able to witness George Kunda’s unveiling of the tombstone after being away from us for one year. It’s very vivid to me, I see him as I speak now, I feel him. And the church where we went to pray now was one church he was very proud of. Always he spoke to me about his church where he prayed and how happy he was to belong to that congregation.”
The former president was actually so pleased to see all the people that showed up to remember George Kunda and said, “I want to thank all of you, I saw in church the various people that came. I saw leaders from other political parties, I saw leaders from the judiciary, I saw members of parliament, I saw my colleagues, former cabinet ministers. All this implies the greatness of the man we are here to honour today.”
Banda paid glowing tribute to the late Kunda describing him as a man particular about hard work. “If you gave George Kunda an assignment to come back and report to cabinet at the next meeting, he will report at that meeting and the report will be complete. Everybody will agree that he paid attention to his assignments for the people of our great country Zambia,” said the former president. Mr. Banda concluded by saying, “During the period that I worked with him, I can testify that I was totally satisfied with the support he gave me and the cabinet and all the people of Zambia as we worked for the future of our country.”
MMD president Nevers Mumba described Kunda as a man who served his country well, a man so dedicated to duty. “May be we will never have known this man but he is a man who served this country well. We are proud of him, of his family because we know for a man to work as hard as he did it was at the expense of his family. They allowed him to do it and they took the heat. We are grateful,” Mumba said. Mumba also said the MMD was grateful for all Kunda did for the party.
“He did not serve his party just because he wanted to be popular but he pushed the cause of liberty and democracy for our country. We are very proud that even after we lost the elections he did not back out like some people. He continued to serve the party. He continued to go to court on behalf of the many members of our party that were falsely accused. He was there for the party until he died. We take of our hats to say thank you,” said the MMD president. “Our word will not suffice,” he added, “but we want to say thank you for the labours that you left behind with us.”
Mumba noted that Kunda’s abilities were exceptional and far between. “Even president Rupiah Banda had to say, you know what George, I think you know what it takes I will give you two jobs instead of one. There are very few people, when people are looking for jobs in cabinet. He was one of the very few people that held two jobs, justice minister and vice president. And that was reflective of his capacity to perform,” he said.
Douglas Siakalima of the UPND had this to say, “This life we remember today, indeed he was a great man. Even when you disagreed with what he said, you still respected he passion with which he would put across certain things. Suffice to say that this man, he was indeed a courageous man. For some of us he has not died in vain. I think he gave us courage to still continue even when under a lot of adversaries we still want to continue emulating him.”
ULP president Sakwiba Sikota who first knew the late Kunda in1980 at the Law Practice Institute, LPI, passionately spoke about how he learned the importance of hard work from the person he simply described a very good man. He also spoke about the time Kunda was vice chairman of the Law Association of Zambia, LAZ. “During my tenure there is a lot of things which I have been credited with and which have been said to have been the success of that tenure. I have said it before in many fora and I will say it again here. All of the successes of my tenure as chairman of LAZ were directly as a result of the late George Kunda. He did all the ground work, he did all the hard work. I merely was honoured to present the hard work that he had done,” said Sikota.
He said what struck him most about Kunda was the passion he had for justice. “He wanted to see a just society for Zambia and we discussed this many times,” Sikota added. The ULP president said he was extremely happy to see Kunda get into politics after him and get into parliament. “It was a joy to have someone like him because the level of intellectual debate that he brought to the house is something which is sadly missing sometimes when I look at the debates that go on,” he said.
Sikota went on to further describe Kunda as one of the leading legal brains Zambia has ever produced, a fact he said every single lawyer in the legal fraternity will acknowledge.
In remembering George Kunda, the man some people credit for speaking in capital letters, there are some who actually think that if he was alive today he would have positively advised the Michael Sata led Patriotic Front, PF, government on the so many things that are just not adding up. Advice is one of the things he liked to give and positively so. He will also be remembered for that by many.
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