A prominent scholar-activist has been found liable for defamation, his accusations unproven. The lesson is not his alone. It belongs to everyone who fights corruption for a living.
By Special Correspondent
On 30 June, the High Court in Ndola found Dr O’Brien Kaaba – constitutional law lecturer, a former presidential appointee to the Anti-Corruption Commission board, a frequent defender of President Hichlema in public commentary and a familiar voice in the country’s governance debates- liable for defaming the former head of the ACC. The court held the published allegations defamatory, rejected the defence raised to justify them, and awarded the plaintiff damages, an injunction and costs. Neither Dr Kaaba nor his witnesses offered any proof of the allegations. Dr Kaaba nonetheless says the judge got the law wrong; he is entitled to that view, and to the appeal he has announced. But the judgment, and the conduct around it, should trouble a constituency far wider than the parties to the case, that is, the anti-corruption movement to which he has attached his name.
It is not the first grave accusation of his to thin out when it was finally put to the test. Not long ago he told the public, in terms, that the country’s Solicitor General was corrupt and that he held the evidence to prove it. When the Solicitor General sued, Dr Kaaba as the defendant was under no obligation to hand his opponent anything, but he chose not to prove it. He settled quickly by consent. As one of the movement’s own, the historian Sishuwa Sishuwa, observed, a man who brands another corrupt and then quietly folds lost the right to be taken seriously when he talks about corruption. In the case just decided, amongst his now dismissed claims, was that he had accused the former ACC head of authorising a specific six-million-dollar payout. The court’s judgment records no evidence for it.
Nor was that the only charge to dissolve on contact with the evidence. He had also told the court that the former ACC head lacked the integrity for the office, that he had been convicted of professional misconduct and faced disbarment, and that he had threatened a “whistle-blower” rather than investigate his complaint. Under cross-examination Dr Kaaba conceded he knew nothing of the plaintiff’s professional standing; and the “whistle-blower” himself, who was one of Dr Kaaba’s own witnesses, told the court he had no evidence he had ever been threatened. A second defence witness accepted, under cross examination, that his own complaint to the ACC had been lodged years before the plaintiff ever became Director General and that the claims behind it had already been lost in court.
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An accusation of corruption is among the most powerful instruments in public life, and Dr Kaaba knows how to wield it. By his own account, his writings helped force the resignation of an ACC director-general, as he says it came the morning after he briefed the President’s National Security Advisor, Dr Lawrence Mwananyanda and, days later, an entire commission board was dissolved. That is precisely why a person who levels such a charge owes the public more than conviction. He owes proof. When the charge is loud and the proof never arrives, the injury does not stop with the person accused. It spreads to the credibility the whole movement depends on and it hands every genuinely corrupt official the same convenient shield: that the accusers are reckless, partisan and not to be believed.
Zambia’s civil society is one of its real achievements. Transparency International’s local chapter, MISA, the Alliance for Community Action and a hundred smaller outfits hold power to account on budgets most of us could not imagine, and they do it on the strength of a single asset: public trust. That asset is finite, and it is shared. Every time the movement lends its platform, its letterhead, or simply its solidarity to a claim that later collapses, it draws down a reserve that belongs to all of them at once. Discernment about whom the movement elevates, and which crusades it falls in behind, is therefore not disloyalty. It is the stewardship of a commons. Solidarity that shields a colleague from the ordinary discipline of proof is not solidarity with the public it claims to serve.
There is a temptation, in movements that believe themselves morally in the right, to treat process as an obstacle and the courts as an inconvenience which are indispensable for holding others to account, tiresome when they come knocking at one’s own door. Dr Kaaba’s response to losing was a same-day attack on the judge’s competence, which leans towards exactly that temptation. But the activist’s label is not a warrant of exemption. The law of defamation, the presumption of innocence, the plain rule that he who accuses must prove bind the accuser as tightly as the accused. A movement that demands accountability of ministers, magistrates and public officials cannot exempt its own from it without hollowing out the very claim that gives it standing.
None of this is an argument for silence. Zambia needs its watchdogs loud and unafraid; the fight against corruption is real and unfinished, and it will always need people willing to say uncomfortable things about powerful individuals. But the movement’s voice is worth heeding only for as long as its accusations are married to evidence. That marriage is not a technicality to be observed when convenient. It is the entire basis of the movement’s authority. Guard it, and the watchdogs keep their bite. Spend it on crusades that cannot survive a courtroom and the only beneficiaries are the very people the movement exists to expose.
