By Chanda Chisala
It’s ridiculous that we are even discussing this in 2025. Two men accused of trying to bewitch the president of Zambia through some kind of magic were arrested in December, 2024. The government used some old colonial era law that is somehow still on the books in modern Zambia. It is one of those anachronistic laws that no one has bothered to repeal simply because they never expected anyone to actually be arrested for witchcraft in this era.
The episode was so ludicrous that even people in other countries were making jokes and comical memes about it, including Zambia’s close neighboring countries like Malawi and Zimbabwe, besides reports in Western media. The Zambian authorities were not deterred by such embarrassing publicity, and proceeded seriously with the case until a conviction of the two was obtained by the prosecution this week. In their plea for leniency, the defense lawyers argued that even the president himself, Mr. Hichilema, has publicly stated that witchcraft does not exist. The judge would have none of that and meted out the maximum sentence of 2 years imprisonment with hard labour!
The context in which the president had declared his skepticism in the existence of witchcraft was when some critics were accusing him of having ritual interests in the body of his deceased predecessor, Mr. Edgar Lungu. Three months after his death, the late former president has still not been buried due to a bizarre impasse between the family of Mr. Lungu and his successor. The family has expressed the strong wish of the deceased to not allow the current president, with whom he had an openly acrimonious relationship, to come “anywhere near the body.” The government of Mr. Hichilema has insisted that this is not acceptable and has taken the family to court in South Africa to prevent his burial in that country, thus continuing a protracted standoff that is unprecedented in Zambian history, if not world history.
It was this unbending insistence that the burial program must include the president, that sparked rumours of witchcraft interests. Some suggested that the president needed to lay his eyes on the body of Mr. Lungu in order to entrench his hold on power, as a new election approaches. Others said he needed to take some body parts for him to perform some spiritual rituals to cleanse himself of some kind of curse for his alleged culpability in the death of his nemesis. A Zambian scholar in South Africa, Sishuwa Sishuwa, had in fact written a long article theorizing that the entire debacle can only be understood if seen through the prism of such witchcraft beliefs from both the president and the family of Mr. Lungu. At least half of his thesis was confirmed when the sister of Mr. Lungu publicly accused the president of having this very motivation of ritualistic witchcraft as she wailed in response to a judgment in the Pretoria Court that ordered the family to hand over the body to the Zambian government. The family has since applied to appeal this judgment to a higher court.
It was at the height of this contentious drama, perhaps with the added pressure from foreign donors to Zambia, that the president emphatically stated that he does not believe in witchcraft, or indeed that witchcraft even exists. This, of course, did not stop the rumours, especially since there was this strange case of men being arrested and tried for the very offense that the president believes exists only in Harry Potter novels.
Unfortunately, the president did nothing to save these two poor people from the torture of enduring arrest and trial for something that “does not exist.” The least that was expected was for the president to express his displeasure for such an irrational arrest, especially in a country where courts are already overburdened with too many pending cases. If anything, this statement would have discouraged the police from wasting resources on such frivolous “crimes” in the future.
What is frustrating is that this is just another case of harmless private citizens suffering immense pain for nothing, with no empathy from those in power. Expressing beliefs in witchcraft should not land anyone in prison, especially in the 21st century. But this only extends the pattern of similar arrests and prosecutions for people who have simply expressed their beliefs, including the controversial video blogger “Why Me” who has now been arrested two times for his “insulting” content, and is undergoing trial that will send him to prison again for his mere opinions. And these are not the only ones: there have been other people, including two harmless women in Chipata, who were arrested and imprisoned for simple harmless words. The common thread in just about all of these cases is the expression of a negative and insulting attitude to President Hichilema.
These events have been especially disappointing because the UPND campaigned on the promise of bringing freedoms to Zambians, and there were many people, including this author, who were fully optimistic that this was the one promise that would be delivered. Unlike their other promises of economic prosperity, this one does not need any expensive resources to deliver. It requires only a commitment to integrity and self restraint, by allowing all kinds of beliefs and opinions to vent without fear of arrest or official persecution. Even without fulfillment of economic promises, creating such a climate of true freedom would have retained the popularity of the UPND. Instead, they have even worsened some freedom-suppressing laws, including the “cyber crime laws” that they vociferously attacked when they were in opposition.
The failure to keep this one promise of free speech has made many Zambians completely lose faith in the sincerity of politicians, which will make it very difficult for any candidate’s promises to be taken seriously in next year’s general elections. This is an unfortunate loss for democracy.
However, it is not too late for our president and his administration to fix this threat of cynicism by abolishing these archaic or repressive laws, and by exercising his prerogative of mercy to pardon everyone who has been convicted for merely expressing their beliefs or opinions, even if these were uncharitable to the president.
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