When repentance is merged with a party: why the State got the prayer day wrong
By Amb Emmanuel Mwamba
Some days a nation keeps because they are holidays, and some it keeps because it needs them. The 18th of October was the second kind. Government has now erased it from the calendar and folded what was left of it into the 29th of December, as if fasting and feasting were the same act on different dates.
The decision was announced by Secretary to the Cabinet Patrick Kangwa, the most senior civil servant in the land and the official voice of Government on such matters. In a statement issued in Lusaka, he said Statutory Instrument Number 78 of 2015 had been revoked and replaced by Statutory Instrument Number 73 of 2026, and that the merger followed consultations with the church mother bodies.
The two days are not the same, and anyone who has ever prayed knows it.
Consider what the 18th was for. Its full name was the National Day of Prayer, Fasting, Repentance and Reconciliation, and every word in that name points inward and downward. People fast to empty themselves and repent because they have done wrong. They reconcile by going to the person they have wounded and asking for forgiveness. It was a day for sackcloth, not for a stage.
The 29th of December is a different occasion. It marks the day in 1991 when President Frederick Chiluba declared Zambia a Christian Nation, a declaration later written into the preamble of our Constitution. It honours a heritage that runs back through the churches that walked with this country from Kaunda’s time. It is a day of thanksgiving, choirs and ceremony, a day to rejoice.
So where, in a day of prayer and reconciliation, do celebration and commemoration come in? No one can fast on their knees in repentance while marching in a ceremony for a historic declaration. No one can weep for the nation’s sins and toast its heritage in the same breath. Reverend Godfridah Sumaili said it plainly: “I am wondering how a day of weeping and repentance could be combined with a day of celebration.” Government has yet to answer her.
If the real concern was the cost of another public holiday, the solution was simple and in plain sight: keep the day and drop the holiday. When the 18th falls on a Thursday, observe it on the Saturday or Sunday that follows, when churches are already full and offices already closed. The nation would keep its altar and the Treasury its working day, and nobody would lose anything.instead Government chose to remove the day altogether, and that choice tells us something.
Look at what was cut. The commemoration survived and so did the heritage. What disappeared were the repentance and the reconciliation, and the timing makes that hard to ignore.
This country has just come through a bitter election. Constituencies such as Mandevu are going back to the polls because the 13 August vote there was inconclusive. Opposition leaders sit in maximum-security prisons while churches plead for a national round table. Many Zambians still carry questions about how the counting ended, and about the elder statesmen this nation has buried along the way.
That is the atmosphere the 18th would have arrived in, with a whole nation gathered around one word: reconciliation. And reconciliation is exactly what our own official record now demands.
The Electoral Commission of Zambia stopped counting, and the reason it gave the nation was violence. Yesterday the President stood before Parliament and declared that the same elections were “peaceful, free and fair”. One arm of the State says there was violence, while the Head of State says there was peace.
Both cannot be fully true. If counting had to stop because of violence, the polls were not entirely peaceful. If the polls were entirely peaceful, the nation is owed a different explanation for why the counting stopped. Either way, Zambians have been handed two official accounts of one election, and a nation holding two truths is a nation split down the middle.
That is precisely what a day of prayer and reconciliation exists for. It is the one day on the calendar built to bring the two sides of a divided country to the same altar, to name what went wrong and to ask for healing. This year, of all years, the country needed the 18th of October more than ever.
Yet this is the year it was abolished. A day of national repentance would have carried those contradictions onto every pulpit in the land, and perhaps that is exactly what someone did not want. Removing the day instead of facing it is not reform. It is cowardice dressed up as administration.
There is one more fair question. The 18th of October was declared under Statutory Instrument Number 78 of 2015, during the time of the late President Edgar Lungu. Does the day simply remind this administration of a political rival it never made peace with? Zambians are entitled to wonder whether a sacred observance has been treated as part of an old regime’s furniture and cleared out with the rest.
It would fit a pattern, because this administration treats everything as a first. Free education, we are told, is a first. Yet Zambians remember free basic education long before 2021. Many of us remember the school milk and biscuits, the free exercise books and the pencils handed out in classrooms when we were growing up.
School feeding is also called a first, and it is not. The Constituency Development Fund is called revolutionary, yet it existed for years before this Government arrived. The President himself told Parliament the fund stood at K1.6 million when his administration took over.
Raising that figure to K40 million on paper is welcome. Zambians, however, judge a fund by what they can touch. In too many constituencies the classrooms, clinics and teachers’ houses that K40 million should have built are still missing, and announcing big numbers is not the same as building with them.
A government that respected the past would have built on the 18th of October rather than buried it. Imagine what the day could have become: the nation’s annual moment of healing after a divisive election. The President, the opposition and the churches could have knelt in one cathedral, with the families of prisoners in the front pews, before the God named in the preamble of our Constitution. No budget line can buy that kind of national cohesion.
The Ministry of National Guidance and Religious Affairs, however, was dissolved soon after this Government took office in 2021, and the day of repentance has now gone the same way. Each step can be explained away on its own. Taken together, they suggest that the Christian character of this nation, written into our founding law, is being emptied out one quiet decision at a time.
It is the no-look pass of football: the ball moves while the player looks elsewhere, and by the time the crowd notices, the goal has gone in. Zambians do notice. They have been watching since 2021, and a merger announced in a Friday evening statement does not fool them.
That brings me to the church. Government says it consulted the church mother bodies, so let the mother bodies speak.
Where is Dr Nevers Mumba on this? Where are Bishop Joe Imakando and Bishop H.K. Banda? Where is Bishop Mususu, and where is Billy Mfula? Where is the United Church of Zambia? What is the position of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, whose members keep the Sabbath and understand better than most what it means to set a day apart? Where are the traditional churches that were praying in this land long before any political party existed?
And who exactly was consulted? Name them. If the decision is sound, publish the minutes of the consultation and let the faithful judge. If it cannot survive being explained, it should never have been made.
Above all, what does the ordinary Zambian think? Nobody asked the woman who fasted every 18th of October for her family and her country.
A nation that declares itself Christian in its Constitution cannot quietly retire its day of repentance and expect neither God nor the people to notice. Zambia’s Christian identity seems to make some in power uncomfortable, because repentance demands that the powerful be humbled too.
Restore the 18th of October. Keep it as a day even if it is no longer a holiday. Let the nation fast, pray and reconcile, and let those in authority kneel alongside everyone else.
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