Soften Her Up: Iris Kaingu and the Politics of Respectability

Nearly fifteen years ago, a non-consensual leak of a private video made 20-year-old Iris Kaingu a household name in Zambia^[1]. Iris and her then partner Teddy Malekani, who never became a household name despite equal culpability, were both convicted and fined under the country’s obscenity laws for appearing in a sexually explicit film. Much of the vitriol was directed towards Iris, obviously because Iris is a woman and society somehow expects women to be “moral”, but also, because Iris is the daughter of politician Michael Kaingu, who was the then Mwandi member of parliament for Mwandi Constituency. In a country with Christian conservatism like Zambia, Iris quickly became the poster child of immorality and a punch line for misogynistic comments both online and offline. This can largely be attributed to her womanhood and the social expectations attached to this identity marker in the Zambian context. Given the intense public scrutiny she received, one would assume that Iris would fade into obscurity. However, Iris wielded the publicity (negative or positive) she was receiving and fashioned herself into a socialite, media personality and entrepreneur. She became a fixture at Zambian social events and played into her ‘scandalous’ incident by posting provocative pictures on her social media. 

In 2021, Iris made national headlines again, but this time for her decision to join politics and run as member of parliament for Mwandi constituency in Western Province under the then ruling Patriotic Front (PF)^[2]. There was an uproar in the court of public opinion as social media keyboard warriors and self-appointed ministers and champions of morality used her previous appearance in an obscene film to discredit her. Comments such as “from porn to parliament” were the joke of the day. However, that didn’t deter Iris, she still went ahead and contested in the 2021 parliamentary elections and lost to the United Party for National Development (UPND) candidate Sibeso Sefulo. Sibeso won with 5,148 votes, Iris came out third with 2,832 votes. Iris’s defeat became the “proof” critics needed to argue that she was not fit for politics and could not escape her tainted public image, as her critics took to social media to mock and taunt her political aspirations. As before, Iris refused to stay down.

This year, Iris made the headlines again when she defected from PF to join the ruling UPND in June and expressed her political aspirations to run as their parliamentary candidate for Mwandi constituency. Soon after her defection, Iris resigned from UPND after the party refused to adopt her as their candidate for Mwandi constituency. The UPND had adopted her previous opponent Sibeso Sefulo as their preferred candidate. Disappointed by the turn of events, Iris decided to contest in the 2026 parliamentary elections as an independent candidate. President Hakainde Hichilema in a public rally in Western Province campaigned against Iris, stating that she was greedy and disloyal for joining a party and not respecting the existing members of the party. “If someone can’t listen to the party president, the Republican President, what will they be doing when they are in parliament?”^[3] 

I interpret President Hichilema’s subtext as him framing Iris as a disobedient young woman who will not obey his commands. His party disciplinary comments echo a much older pattern in Zambian politics. Under Kenneth Kaunda’s one-party state, the ruling party’s Women’s Brigade, later the Women’s League, gave women no positions in the leadership structure or decision-making power of their own; men set the agenda, the discussion points, and even the venue^[4]. It was only after the 1991 return to multiparty democracy that a new generation of younger, educated women began contesting that inherited subservience and notably, the backlash they faced came not only from men, but from older women within the party structures built to contain them^[5]. President Hichilema’s comments sit inside that same inheritance: a woman’s political legitimacy measured by her obedience, not her capacity to deliver.

Iris Kaingu took to her social media to share her disappointment with the president’s comments, citing that it was undemocratic for him to come to her constituency and command her people to not vote for her. In a live video (which Iris has since deleted from her Facebook account but can be accessed here^[6]), she revealed that the president had promised her a political position, but she refused out of service to the people of Mwandi. Iris claims the president used her positionality as a woman and youth to lure her into believing a job would be guaranteed if she withdrew her candidature. Shockingly, Iris disclosed that the President asked her father Michael Kaingu to “soften her up”, but Kaingu reminded him that Iris is a grown woman capable of making her own decisions^[7][8]. A sitting president asking a woman’s father to manage his adult daughter’s political choices is evidence that in Zambia, politics is still a male affair and women’s political participation is on men’s terms be it fathers, husbands or male party officials. Can’t a woman simply decide to run for office and stick it out without the permission of men? Iris contested and won the Mwandi Constituency Parliamentary seat as an independent candidate in the just-ended 13^th August 2026 elections, narrowly defeating UPND’s Sibeso Sefulo 6,595 votes to 6,110^[9]. 

Iris’s victory raises important questions: is there a gap between online moral panic and how rural constituents actually vote? Did the Mwandi electorate simply not care as much about the scandal as urban social media moral police? In her live video, Iris challenged the UPND preferred candidate Sibeso Sefulo whom she claimed had failed the people of Mwandi who still do not have clean drinking water and a maternity wing for the mothers during her five-year tenure. Maybe the people of Mwandi are not necessarily interested in the politics of respectability but want an improved quality of life. Granted, Iris is standing on the shoulders of her father who was once a member of parliament for the same constituency; that access definitely cushioned her in ways an ordinary Zambian woman with the same scandal wouldn’t have. Her privilege bought her the ability to survive what would have ended an ordinary woman’s political prospects; but. Iris’s narrow victory suggests that the scandal and the president’s comments may have cost her support even as her focus on service ultimately carried the day. 

Iris is one of many young women living in a society that wants women to play small; in her case, she is confined to the prison of her previous transgressions. When women participate in national politics, they are often branded as “mothers” or “mothers of the nation”. Women themselves have used motherhood both to validate their claim to represent the people and to assert authority over national issues. For example, Presidential candidate Given Katuta Mwelwa used her authority as a mother during the August 13 election period to condemn violence. “Men kill for power because they have never been in a LABOUR WARD to deliver a LIFE into this world [emphasis in original]. They do not know the pain of a mother.”^[10] However, Iris does not fit the motherhood rhetoric; she is a young, unmarried, child-free and undisciplined woman, in the president’s own framing, who still needs a talking to by her father to bring her back in line. Iris is a woman some sections of society may deem as “jezebel”. She is a conventionally attractive woman who is not afraid to challenge the politics of respectability of dress and self-expression publicly. A woman who believes in herself so much that she defied the president’s orders and society’s social commentary not to contest but contested anyway and won. 

The public opinion of morality on social media has once again parroted the decade-old obscene film to discredit Iris. What is interesting is that former Minister of General Education David Mabumba, who was the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP) parliamentary aspirant for Mwense constituency in Luapula, also had a non-consensual video leak in 2020, which led to his dismissal^[11]. However, Mabumba’s candidacy and victory have not received half the vitriol and public scrutiny that Iris has been subjected to in the election build-up and post-election. It must be stated that Mabumba has served in government before and has more experience in comparison to Iris, but his identity is not tied to his obscene material. This is because, in Zambian society men’s sexual scandals are read as one bad episode while women’s get read as a character flaw.

Honourable Iris Kaingu is an example of a young woman who rejects the politics of respectability and is actively carving out her own lane in Zambian politics regardless of what Zambian society thinks of her. The people of Mwandi, in voting for Iris, remind us that maybe respectability politics is a preoccupation of people who already have clean water, and people of Mwandi have other things to vote on.

Chishimba Kasanga is a Zambian DPhil (PhD) student in the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford.

Endnotes