Written By | International News Agencies
Under Zambian law, treason is not bailable and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.
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Lusaka
Three weeks after Zambians voted, the country's constitutional watchdog has publicly told the police and the prosecution service to either charge, bail or free at least 84 people still held in connection with the Aug. 13 general election — an intervention that lands while the man who finished second in the presidential race sits in a maximum-security prison on a treason charge with no first court appearance yet scheduled.
The Human Rights Commission's demand, issued this week and reported Friday, is the most concrete accounting yet of the scale of detentions that followed a vote which returned President Hakainde Hichilema to office and simultaneously produced the gravest political crisis of his tenure. It matters now because the arithmetic of the post-election period has finally been made public by a state body rather than by the opposition: 84 people in custody, 18 of them facing a charge that is not bailable, and a governing party that has just been sworn in for another five years insisting that none of this amounts to a crackdown.
What the Commission said
Commission Chairperson Dr. Pamela Towela Sambo said prolonged detention without a court appearance violates Articles 13 and 18 of Zambia's Constitution as well as international human rights law to which Zambia is a party. "The commission is monitoring several cases," she said in a statement.
Her examples were specific. She cited Alphonso Daka and 42 others arrested on Aug. 14 in Roma Township, Lusaka, who remained in custody at Chelston as of Sept. 1 despite investigations having been concluded. She flagged six men arrested in Ng'ombe on Aug. 13 — Newton Miti, Joseph Phiri, Collins Kavwali, Kennedy Chimfwembe, Emmanuel Banda and Fredrick Machali — whom she said had spent 19 days in custody without formal charge, along with a seventh man, Enock Roosevelt Tonga, arrested at the National Results Centre on Aug. 17. In Kalabo, 16 people, including the musicians known as Chester and Felix Phiri and a comedian performing as IDC Light Comedy, were granted bail only after an extended period in custody on riotous-behaviour charges.
Sambo also raised the case of the opposition figure Kennedy Kamba, who she said had been detained for roughly two weeks after already being granted bail, and whose whereabouts were established only recently, at Kabwata Police Station.
She rejected the argument that overcrowded police cells justify delays in processing detainees, and called on police to review all outstanding cases, disclose the whereabouts of those held and guarantee access to families and lawyers. "…Release all those whose continued detention exposes the risk of ill-treatment, restricts access to legal representation and undermines public confidence," she said.
How Zambia got here
Zambia went to the polls on Aug. 13 to elect a president, members of the National Assembly, councillors and council chairs. Official results gave Hichilema 60 percent and Brian Mundubile, the candidate of the National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity, 38 percent. Mundubile rejected the outcome and alleged manipulation.
Counting itself was disrupted. Vote tabulation was suspended for six hours on election day and the army was deployed in Lusaka, with reports of direct interference in the count. Six international observer missions — among them the European Union, the Southern African Development Community, the African Union and the Commonwealth — subsequently raised concerns about the post-election environment. EU observers cited intimidation during the electoral process; SADC pointed to delays in counting and the deployment of security forces as factors that eroded public confidence.
The day after the vote, security forces raided a property linked to Mundubile in Lusaka's Kabulonga suburb. Mutotwe Kafwaya, a former cabinet minister, was shot dead during the operation. The government has acknowledged responsibility for his death. Security forces said they recovered military-grade equipment, including firearms, at the premises — a finding that has anchored the government's public defence of the arrests that followed.
Mundubile and his running mate, Makebi Zulu, took refuge in a United Nations facility in Lusaka. According to Zambia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, their handover to the authorities was facilitated personally by the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy, Parfait Onanga-Anyanga, on the basis of assurances that the two men's constitutional rights would be respected. Before surrendering, Mundubile said he and his colleagues were being targeted for opposing poverty, injustice and what he described as shrinking space for free expression.
Both were detained and charged with treason on Aug. 29. Their lawyer, Milner Katolo, said 17 others, including Zulu, had been charged alongside Mundubile; the Human Rights Commission puts the total facing treason charges arising from the Kabulonga raid at 18. Among the co-accused are Bishop Trevor Mwamba, the senior lawyer George Chisanga and the businessman Patrick Mwansa. The group was moved to Mukobeko Maximum Security Prison in Kabwe on Aug. 30, where they remain. No date for a first court appearance has been announced.
Under Zambian law, treason is not bailable and carries a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. The government has been at pains to correct one point of international commentary: Zambia abolished the death penalty under the Penal Code in December 2022 and subsequently removed it from military law, so the charge is not capital.
The opposition was unable to file a legal challenge to the presidential result. The courts were sealed off by the authorities before the deadline for lodging a petition passed. Hichilema was sworn in for a second term on Sept. 1, with his principal rival in prison.
The dispute over language
The most revealing argument of the past week has not been about evidence but about vocabulary. United Nations Special Rapporteur Gina Romero described 11 opposition leaders facing treason charges as "political detainees" and called for their immediate release. The government rejected the term sharply, arguing that it prejudges matters still before the courts and that describing those held as political detainees implies a conclusion about the nature of the charges that has not been established through due process. It has likewise disputed the characterisation of the post-election period as a "crackdown."
The Human Rights Commission has tried to stand outside that fight. It says its monitoring role is independent of the political dispute and that its concern is narrower and constitutional: how long people are held before charge, in what conditions, and with what access to lawyers and relatives — irrespective of the nature of any individual case.
That framing is doing real work. By declining to argue about whether the detainees are political prisoners and insisting instead on Articles 13 and 18, the Commission has put the government in the position of having to answer a procedural question it cannot easily deflect: why, three weeks on, have 84 people not been charged or released?
Transparency International Zambia has been blunter, saying the timing of the Mundubile and Zulu arrests suggests political motivation. Mundubile's lawyers said this week that the United Nations, SADC and church mother bodies have engaged the government in an effort to negotiate a resolution to the treason case — an unusual admission that the matter is being handled diplomatically as well as judicially.
Why this is different from an ordinary post-election dispute
Zambia has been a reference point for peaceful transfers of power since 1991, a record most recently reaffirmed in 2021, when Hichilema himself won from opposition after years of prosecution and detention under a previous government. He was himself charged with treason in April 2017, was still awaiting trial that August, and was freed after the state signalled it was prepared to drop the charge. That biography is now part of the story: the president who was once the defendant in a treason case presides over a state that has charged his closest challenger with the same offence.
The immediate political consequence is that Zambia has entered a second Hichilema term without a settled account of the first ballot. The result was never tested in court, because the court was physically unavailable. The opposition's leadership is in Kabwe. The Tonse Alliance's internal structures are asserting continuity in Mundubile's absence — the Mundubile Ecl Movement, chaired by Davies Mwila, says he remains the substantive alliance leader and has demanded the release of Mundubile, Zulu and the other accused unless credible evidence is produced.
The economic backdrop compounds the risk. Zambia is a copper economy that spent years in default and restructuring, and its recovery has depended heavily on the goodwill of Western lenders and observers who have now placed formal criticisms of the election on the record. A protracted treason prosecution of the runner-up is precisely the kind of development that reprices political risk.
What to watch
Three things will determine whether this becomes a contained legal process or a sustained crisis. The first is a date. Until the accused are produced in court, the case exists only as an accusation and a prison roll. A first appearance would begin to test the evidence the government says it recovered at Kabulonga; continued delay will strengthen the argument that the charge is a holding device.
The second is the 84. If the police and the National Prosecution Authority act on the Commission's demand within days, the government's argument that this is ordinary criminal process survives. If the number is still 84 in a fortnight, it will not.
The third is the negotiation. The involvement of the UN, SADC and the churches suggests both sides may be looking for an exit that does not require a verdict. Zambia has done this before: the 2017 treason case against Hichilema ended not with an acquittal but with the state withdrawing the charge after outside mediation. Whether the president who benefited from that precedent is willing to apply it to the man who ran against him is now the central question in Zambian politics.
