ACTUALIZATION OF BAROTSELAND STATEHOOD
Accept our compliments of the season and congratulations on your assumption of office of President of Zambia following the 20th January 2015 Presidential elections. We write to you regarding the above subject and welcome you to the reality of assuming the Presidency of a failed unitary state of Zambia. We trust and hope that you will not run away from this reality as did your predecessors but engage us in the transition process of actualizing Barotseland statehood in a pacific manner. We have a rich understanding of what constitutes the Republic of Zambia—going back to the amalgamation of the territories of North-Eastern Rhodesia and Barotseland-Northwestern Rhodesia in 1911 to create the Protectorate of Northern Rhodesia, the forerunner jurisdiction to the Republic of Zambia. This was based on several treaties, the last of which was the Barotseland Agreement 1964 which facilitated for Northern Rhodesia to proceed to independence as one country and one nation, as opposed to dissolution into its former constituent territories as a consequence of the termination of the unifying colonial treaties. To verify the foregoing assertion, we invite Your Excellency to carefully read, in sequential order, the following provisions of the constitutive statutes of the Republic of Zambia:- i) The preamble to the Barotseland Agreement 1964 as well as its clause 1; ii) Section 1 and 8 of the Zambia Independence Act; and iii) Section 20 of the Zambia Independence Order. The road to independence in 1964 and the role Barotseland played in that process is well known and well documented, even though the first President, Dr. Kenneth David Kaunda tried to make it his entire life project to suppress it from the Zambian people and prevailed on his successors to continue oppressing the people of Barotseland. Since independence, the people of Barotseland have watched with great dismay how successive Zambian regimes violated the Barotseland Agreement 1964; the very fabric of the basis of the unitary state of Zambia thereby leading to its unilateral repudiation in 1969, and, thereafter, continued violations of the human rights of the peoples of Barotseland. It has always been the desire and expectation of the people of Barotseland to have that Agreement, embodying their human and minority rights, respected by the people of Zambia and successive Zambian regimes but such expectation has proven to be in vain. It was against that background that the peoples of Barotseland, through the March 2012 Barotse National Council (BNC), resolved to accept the repudiation of the Barotseland Agreement 1964 and, thereby, set in motion the process of separating the territories of Barotseland and the rest of Zambia. We do not understand why the rest of Zambian people, Zambian politicians, Zambian government, and Dr. Kenneth Kaunda and his successors fail to understand that without the Barotseland Agreement 1964, there is no unitary state called Zambia. As it were, the Barotseland Agreement 1964 is no more. Barotseland has since taken steps to engage the leaders of Zambia with a view to working out transitional arrangements towards self-determination and self-rule for Barotseland, but the Zambian regime has responded with more human rights abuses against the peoples of Barotseland while running away from international arbitration. Additional steps taken include:Yours faithfully,
Clement Wainyae Sinyinda
Chairperson General
Barotse National Freedom Alliance
of the Kingdom of Barotseland