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I was recently asked to give remarks at a Media Institute of Southern Africa event on the need to protect the social media space from political interference. I began to think about why the media, particularly social media, is so important and what its impact has been on the world. The media is called the Fourth Estate because it provides checks and balances on government. Traditionally those checks and balances are provided through spoken or written word. It was the writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton who coined the phrase “the pen is mightier than the sword” or, as Mark Twain put it, “never fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”.

The modern-day advent of the internet and the smart phone has made social media a phenomenon. We only have to think of how social media initiated the Arab Spring, mainstreamed the #BlackLivesMatter movement, or even much closer to home, ended #Lintonlies to see just how powerful it can be.

With a woman’s ambition to lead comes the risk of being undermined, maligned, side-lined or even physically attacked, simply because women are still viewed as the weaker sex. This year, I was elected as the first female President of the Law Association of Zambia in the 53-year history of the organisation and its predecessor the Law Society of Zambia. Having been in office since May this year, I now concur with the late, great “philosopher” David Bowie who jokingly said, “Don’t be the first, be the second”. On a serious note, being a relatively young female leader in a patriarchal society is fraught with challenges; the first of which is actually getting into office.  

Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde has written a follow-up article on governance in Africa. Previously, she examined the institutions that enable a country to function effectively for all its people - or not, as is the case in so many African countries.  In this article, which was published in the Lusaka Times, Kasonde looks at how important an independent judiciary can be in reining in the excesses of a corrupt leadership and holding even heads of state accountable.

Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde shared an article with AFLI that has been posted to the online magazine, The Alchemist. The article is on page 19 of the publication, along with a number of other articles of interest, but if you don't want to click through, the full text follows below.

The following essay, titled "Just another African country: the challenge of leadership in Zambia and the poverty of ambition", was written by Tutu Fellow Linda Kasonde.  It examines African leadership and more specifically, leadership in Zambia, as the country recently celebrated its 50th independence anniversary.