On the afternoon of Friday, 31^st January 2025, President of the International Relations Association of Zambia (IRAZ), Ms. Rose Nsepe and IRAZ Advisory Board Member, Dr. Njunga M Mulikita paid a courtesy call on veteran diplomat and former academic Dr. Kasuka Mutukwa at his residence in Shimabala, located on the southern environs of Lusaka.  Dr Mutukwa warmly welcomed the IRAZ mission and invited his visitors to engage in a highly productive, enlightening and candid dialogue.

Dr Mutukwa outlined his enormous experience in public service by recalling his service as former Chairman of the Department of Political & Administrative Studies (PAS) at the University of Zambia in the 1970s prior to his assuming the position of Zambia’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations (UN) in New York. After serving as Deputy Representative, he recollected his service as Chief of Environmental Education at the Nairobi (Kenya) based United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)(1981-1985).   After leaving the United Nations (UN) Secretariat, Dr. Mutukwa served the Arusha (Tanzania) based East and Southern Africa Management Institute as Director General before returning to Zambia in the early 1990s. Thereafter he became Member of Parliament for Nalolo constituency (1996-1999) and assumed the position of founding Secretary-General of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Parliamentary Forum in 1999. He served in this capacity for a decade and laid down the embryonic foundations of a SADC Parliament along the lines of the ECOWAS Parliament and the Parliament of the Andean Pact/Community in South America.  Dr Mutukwa is a keen watcher/observer of Sino-African cooperation and his Doctoral thesis at Columbia University was on the subject of the international politics of the Tanzania-Zambia Railway Project of the 1970s.

President Rose Nsepe on her part expressed profound gratitude and appreciation to Dr Mutukwa for the very generous welcome accorded to her and Advisory Board Member Dr Mulikita and briefed Dr Mutukwa on IRAZ vision and activities. The emerging consensus from the talks was that IRAZ should carve itself a unique niche in the study of international relations and should earnestly and urgently pursue the goal of holding a conference that would result in production of an academic book on ‘Zambia and the World’. Dr Mutukwa further exhorted IRAZ to constructively engage government on making recruitment into the foreign service, particularly for the youth more transparent and fairer.  It was further agreed that there should be enunciation of score card/benchmark against which performance of diplomatic missions could be measured to ensure the country obtains value for money from diplomatic missions.

In concluding the courtesy call President Nsepe assured Dr Mutukwa that IRAZ would call upon him to share his perspectives on diplomacy and international relations at appropriate Round Tables that the Association would organize in due course.