Maria Zaloumis Should not be Unfairly Favoured or Unfairly Punished

By Chanda Chisala

We were all surprised when businesswoman and social media influencer Maria Zaloumis was not arrested by the police following the infamous incident in which a poor young man, Enoch Kasengele, who allegedly tried to attack her at her farm ended up dying at the hospital. Zaloumis was clearly in the video of the incident (that she apparently recorded), so many expected she might be charged with at least something since she was part of the group interrogating the victim before his death. Instead, the police arrested all the men in the video (charged with murder), but claimed she had nothing to do with the crime.

After loud public outcry on social media, the police suddenly changed their minds and decided to also charge her with the crime of murder. To me, that was even more shocking than their earlier decision of not charging her with anything.

This is not a popular view, but I find this murder charge for Zaloumis disturbing, given what the police initially said about her. How did the police shift from “she’s absolutely totally innocent of any crime at all” to “she’s a dangerous murderer too” so quickly: that’s a very big leap. There is no way you can look at the same general evidence in this case and somehow shift from seeing someone as merely “the helpless victim of an attempted crime” to “one of the main villains” like some Hollywood movie with an implausible twist. Neither decision by the police inspires much confidence in the objectivity of the justice system – or at least the part where the police are involved.

It is disheartening to think that the police are able to just randomly charge someone with the highest crime due to loud social media pressure. Do they even know what they are doing? Surely there is some other crime on the spectrum between completely innocent “self-defense” on one end, and violent murder on the other end, if it’s true you are only looking at the evidence to make your decisions.

The reason the public was initially outraged was because they suspected the accused was left out of the arrests due to her connection to the chairwoman of the Electoral Commission of Zambia, Mwangala Zaloumis, who happens to be her mother. Photos of Zaloumis and the mother standing next to the president of Zambia himself soon popped up on many Facebook pages, with the obvious implication of who was supposedly behind the police inaction.

The public is right to vigilantly demand that no one should be above the law due to their connection to the corridors of power. On the other hand, no one should be treated unfairly due to that same “connection” to someone in power when pressure mounts on the police to act independently. They should follow evidence only, not fear of politicians and not pressure from the public.

There is a very plausible reason the police could have initially left Maria Zaloumis out of the high charge of murder specifically: as the only woman, it would not be totally shocking if she did not take part in the beating up of the victim. Yes, sometimes women can take part in such violent behaviour, but is it really hard to believe that she did not see the need to take part when there were many men in the same place? Besides, her hands were probably busy holding her cellphone to record the incident.

This does not mean she did nothing wrong. The police could have surely charged her of something in the first place, even as a passive participant, or indeed as the boss of the workers who took part in the crime. It would then be up to the prosecution to prove that she’s the one who ordered them to do the beating, and not her boyfriend – who appeared to be more in charge of the violent side in the video we saw. (We could see even the workers and Maria herself trying to translate to the Nigerian boyfriend the request of the nyanja-speaking victim to loosen the painful ropes he was tied with a bit, which probably indicates who was really in charge.)

Yes, we don’t want to live in a country where some people are shielded from the law due to their connections. But neither do we want anyone to be unfairly punished just because of that same connection. All we ask is that the police be objective, professional and independent, not favoring those connected to power, but also not reactively punishing those with some tenuous connection to power when social media pressure mounts. The eyes of Lady Justice must be blind all the way from arrest to final judgment, and she must also be deaf to the noise of public pressure to overreact when a popular (or unpopular) figure is involved. Only evidence and reason must guide the footsteps of this blind, deaf Lady as she dispenses justice in any civilised society.

The author, Chanda Chisala, is the Founder of Zambia Online and Khama Institute. He is formerly a John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and Visiting Scholar to the Hoover Institution, a policy think tank at Stanford. He was also a Reagan Fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/chandachisala