DEC Boss Crosses the Line

By Thandiwe Ketiš Ngoma

The statement issued by Drug Enforcement Commission Director General Nason Banda regarding the summoning of Archbishop Alick Banda is troubling not because of what it claims, but because of what it reveals.

Mr. Banda insists the matter is “nothing political.” Yet his conduct points in the opposite direction. He chose to speak publicly about a summons that, by his own admission, is a private legal instrument. He issued warnings instead of limiting himself to procedural clarity. He went further by prescribing how an Archbishop should present himself at DEC offices. Neutral law enforcement does not behave this way.

If the matter were routine, it would have remained routine. There would have been no press engagement, no public cautioning, and no attempt to manage public optics. The decision to step into the media space transformed a legal process into a political spectacle. That choice rests squarely with the DEC Director General.

The most revealing moment came when Mr. Banda warned the Archbishop not to come “with cadres.” This was not a careless word. It was a political label, loaded with Zambia’s partisan history and routinely used to delegitimise public support by casting it as disorderly or threatening.

Archbishop Alick Banda is not a politician. He does not command cadres. He leads a church. His followers are congregants, clergy, and citizens exercising conscience, not party militants mobilised for confrontation. By invoking the language of cadres, Mr. Banda projected a political mindset onto a religious figure who does not operate in that space.

Equally inappropriate was the Director General’s effort to reference his personal Catholic faith as a shield against criticism. Personal belief is not an institutional defence. Public confidence in law enforcement is not earned through declarations of faith, but through restraint, professionalism, and adherence to due process.

More concerning is the tone adopted throughout the statement. Warnings replaced invitations. Commentary replaced procedure. The language suggested suspicion rather than inquiry. In any justice system worthy of trust, the presumption of innocence is non-negotiable. Public officials do not speak as though conclusions have already been reached.

If the Archbishop’s name arose in court proceedings, the correct response was simple and lawful: a summons issued quietly, followed by questioning conducted without theatre. Anything beyond that creates the impression of intimidation, particularly when directed at a church leader who has previously spoken on matters of governance and public morality.

The Catholic Church has long occupied the role of national conscience. Attempts, perceived or real, to pressure or frame its leadership through state institutions inevitably provoke public resistance. History has taught Zambians to be alert when power appears eager to discipline moral voices.

Mr. Banda may insist that nothing political is at play. His language, posture, and public warnings suggest otherwise.

Law enforcement exists to investigate, not to sermonise. It is meant to apply the law, not to manage narratives. It must treat every citizen, bishops included, with procedural dignity and without insinuation.

Power exercised without restraint erodes trust. Justice applied without neutrality ceases to be justice.

Why is President Hakainde Hichilema going after Archbishop Alick Banda?

By Brian Matambo | Lusaka, Zambia

In a nation that proclaims itself Christian, there are moments when law, power, and conscience collide so loudly that silence becomes impossible. Zambia is standing in such a moment.

The summoning of Lusaka Archbishop Dr. Alick Banda by the Drug Enforcement Commission has triggered questions that no procedural statement can dismiss. The issue is no longer whether the State has the legal authority to summon a citizen. It is whether the State understands the moral, historical, and political weight of the citizen it has chosen to summon, and the moment it has chosen to do so.

The question Zambians are now asking is simple, unsettling, and unavoidable. Why Archbishop Alick Banda?

Is it because he officiated at the funeral service of late former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu, offering dignity where the State had offered hostility? Is it because the Lungu family, in their moment of deepest grief, chose Archbishop Banda as their representative in mediation talks, while government appointed Bishop Joshua Banda to sit on the opposite side? Is it because Archbishop Banda has emerged, quietly but firmly, as a voice of reason in a season where reason itself has become inconvenient?

Or is it because this regime finds moral clarity acutely discomforting?

The State insists the matter is purely legal. That a motor vehicle once belonging to the Zambia Revenue Authority found its way to the Archbishop, and that questions must therefore be asked. Yet even within the factual record now circulating publicly, the narrative is far less sensational than the accusations suggest. Investigations into the disposal of ZRA vehicles were conducted by a Joint Investigations Team comprising multiple agencies. That process resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two former ZRA officials, Kingsley Chanda and Callistus Kaoma, for failure to follow procedure in the disposal of 22 vehicles.

What is conspicuously absent from the court record is any finding that Archbishop Alick Banda stole, solicited, or unlawfully acquired a motor vehicle. Evidence presented in court shows that when the Archbishop learned that the Toyota Hilux associated with him was under investigation, he surrendered it voluntarily to the Joint Investigations Team. The vehicle was not recovered from him. It was handed over by him. It was later produced in court as an exhibit in the case against the ZRA officials. No charge was laid against the Archbishop. No offence was attributed to him. If there had been evidence of criminality, the prosecution would have had every opportunity to add his name to the charge sheet. It did not.

This is why the current summons feels less like due process and more like insistence. As if the State is determined to extract something that has already been examined, testified to, and judicially concluded. As if explanation itself is now the offence.

Context matters. History matters. Memory matters.

Not long ago, a senior official of the ruling party publicly labelled Archbishop Banda “the Lucifer of Zambia”. It was a statement so incendiary, so reckless, that it should have attracted immediate condemnation and discipline from the highest office in the land. Instead, the response was silence. Worse still, the silence felt like approval. When private citizens attempted to pursue legal redress for hate speech and criminal defamation, the process was swiftly halted. The insult stood. The wound festered.

Zambians did not forget.

They also did not forget that when civil society and the Oasis Forum sought to oppose the controversial Bill 7, the Catholic Church was deliberately isolated and vilified, its clergy paraded as political villains, its bishops reduced to unnamed enemies of the State. Ministers were deployed to disparage the Church. It felt, to many observers, like a forced ultimatum. Choose the President, or choose your faith.

Now add to this a record that troubles the conscience of the nation. A government that sued a widow on the very day she was meant to bury her husband, because the President insisted that he alone should preside over the burial of his political nemesis. A government whose leader once dismissed the National Day of Prayer and Reconciliation as irrelevant, while his own ministers derided it as a gathering of wilful sinners. A government that has held the former first family in mourning for seven months, not out of necessity, but out of ego and control.

These are not the actions of humility. They are the habits of power unrestrained by reverence.

It is therefore deeply ironic that those who defend this posture dare to accuse a Catholic Archbishop of Luciferian tendencies. If the term has any meaning at all, it describes pride that exalts itself above all else. It describes power that refuses accountability. It describes authority that weaponises institutions to silence moral resistance.

In Christian theology, those who suffer for speaking truth do not wear the mark of evil. They carry the cost of the Gospel.

Archbishop Alick Banda has not called for insurrection. He has not mobilised violence. He has not abused office. He has spoken, presided, mediated, and prayed. If that makes him a threat, then the problem is not the Bishop. It is the State.

Zambia’s democracy was never meant to be a courtroom without conscience. It was meant to be a covenant between law, reason, and faith. When any one of these is crushed under the weight of ego, the nation begins to fracture.

This moment demands restraint. It demands wisdom. It demands that power remember it is temporary, while faith endures.

A Christian nation is not measured by how loudly leaders invoke God at commemorations, but by how carefully they treat His servants when those servants become inconvenient.

Zambia must choose reason over vendetta, democracy over intimidation, and faith over fear.

How the State Turned an Archbishop into a Flashpoint

“Sometimes the law answers the question of what can be done. Politics answers the harder question of whether it should be done that way, at that moment, to that person.”

By Cleophas Mangani

The summoning of Lusaka Archbishop Dr. Alick Banda by the Drug Enforcement Commission has now crossed a critical threshold. It is no longer merely a legal matter or a political controversy. It has become a national moment, charged with memory, faith, fear, and unresolved mistrust between the State and one of Zambia’s most influential institutions.

On the surface, the State insists there is nothing extraordinary about the matter. The DEC has maintained that the summons is a routine investigative step linked to a long-running case involving the disposal of Zambia Revenue Authority vehicles. Its Director General, Nason Banda, has stressed that no citizen is above the law, that a call-out is not a declaration of guilt, and that due process demands every person whose name arises in an investigation be given a chance to respond.

Legally, the argument is sound.

However, Zambia is not responding to this matter as if it were a courtroom file. It is responding to it as a story layered with history.

For many Zambians, the name Alick Banda does not surface in isolation. It resurfaces alongside memories that were never resolved. They recall the moment when the Archbishop was publicly denounced as “the Lucifer of Zambia” by a senior ruling-party official. They recall accusations that he was partisan, aligned with opposition politics, stripped of clerical neutrality in political rhetoric. They recall scenes of police presence at Catholic spaces, and years of hostility that were never formally acknowledged or corrected.

That history matters.

So when the State now says, “This is just procedure,” a significant portion of the public does not hear procedure. It hears pattern.

The timing has only deepened the unease. The summons was issued on New Year’s Eve, a day traditionally reserved for prayer, reflection, and national thanksgiving. For church leaders and congregations, it was a moment heavy with symbolism. The question that immediately followed was simple yet powerful: what was so urgent that it could not wait a day or two? Why summon a sitting Archbishop at the threshold of a new year, when discretion could have achieved the same legal purpose?

That question has not gone away.

The underlying ZRA case itself is more complex than public narratives suggest. Former ZRA Commissioner General Kingsley Chanda and former Director of Administration Callistus Kaoma were convicted for failure to follow procedure in the disposal of 22 vehicles. Yet records indicate that the vehicle associated with Archbishop Banda was not among those forming the basis of the convictions. ZRA documentation shows that obsolete vehicles were sold to employees, some of whom later transferred them to third parties. A gate pass dated November 2020 has circulated publicly as evidence that at least one such vehicle exited ZRA premises through administrative channels.

None of this renders the Archbishop immune to questioning. That point bears repeating. No citizen, cleric or otherwise, is above the law.

But the law does not operate in a vacuum.

As the saga unfolded, partisan platforms amplified suspicion, social media hardened into accusation, and commentary blurred the line between an individual inquiry and an institutional confrontation with the Catholic Church. The Church, which commands deep grassroots reach and is estimated to influence millions of voters, found itself drawn into a narrative it did not initiate.

Then came the public defence from the DEC. Measured. Procedural. Correct. And, for many, too late.

By the time assurances were given that the investigation was not political, that the DEC Director General himself is Catholic, that Archbishop Banda is his own Archbishop, the matter had already escaped the confines of law enforcement. It had entered identity, belief, and collective memory.

The intervention by Rev. Chilekwa Mulenga captured that shift vividly. Drawing from scripture, he framed the moment not merely as a legal dispute but as part of what he described as a sustained pressure on church leaders. He questioned the urgency, the manner, and the symbolism of the summons, arguing that even lawful authority must be exercised with wisdom, especially in a fractured environment.

His words resonated because they echoed a wider sentiment: that this episode feels less like an isolated investigation and more like the culmination of a long, unresolved tension between the State and the Church.

That perception has been reinforced by academic and civic commentary in recent years warning of attempts to contain the influence of the Catholic Church, to neutralise critical voices, and to weaken institutions that have historically acted as moral counterweights to political power. Whether those claims are accepted oar rejected, their persistence underscores a deeper problem, a trust deficit.

With elections less than a year away, the political implications are impossible to ignore. The Catholic Church is not merely a religious body; it is a social force. Actions that appear heavy-handed or poorly timed risk being read not as enforcement of law, but as provocation.

This is the heart of the Banda saga.

The State may well be legally correct. But legality alone does not guarantee legitimacy. Power exercised without sensitivity to history, timing, and perception can harden opposition rather than secure compliance.

In trying to assert that no one is untouchable, the State may have reminded millions why they feel targeted. In insisting on procedure, it may have underestimated memory. In pressing forward, it may have stepped on a political landmine of its own making.

Sometimes the law answers the question of what can be done.
Politics answers the harder question of whether it should be done that way, at that moment, to that person.