Why is President Hakainde Hichilema going after Archbishop Alick Banda? 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?
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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 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. 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.
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