President Kenneth Kaunda once jailed his rivals to keep power. He lost it anyway.
President Frederick Chiluba jailed President Kaunda to keep power. He lost it anyway.
President Edgar Lungu jailed President Hakainde Hichilema to keep power. He lost it anyway.
Now President Hakainde Hichilema is jailing his rivals to keep power.
History is not being subtle about how this ends.
There is an old proverb, carried in songs from one end of the continent to the other, that every Zambian government has now been forced to learn in turn: no condition is permanent.
Not power. Not fear. Not the machinery a state builds when it decides the safest way to handle disagreement is to arrest it.
Since the 13 August election, the pattern has become impossible to miss. Several opposition leaders are in detention, charged with treason, while the courts that might have heard his election challenge were shuttered.
Hundreds of opposition supporters were arrested, many held past the legally mandated time without formal charge.
Former minister Mutotwe Kafwaya died after a raid the government has yet to explain with independent evidence.
Passports cancelled - including that of Dr Sishuwa Sishuwa, a historian whose only weapon has ever been a pen - under a vague invocation of “national security” that the law does not actually permit.
Here is the part that should make every UPND strategist uneasy, if they are honest with themselves: None of this is new. Zambia has run this exact experiment twice before, with the two parties UPND itself grew up fighting.
The MMD tried it. It didn’t work.
In October 1997, after a coup attempt, President Chiluba declared a state of emergency and jailed people without charge - including President Kaunda, the very man he had beaten at the ballot box.
Opposition leaders were rounded up. A permanent Human Rights Commission was starved of premises the moment it criticised the use of torture in detention. It took donor pressure and an aid freeze to force the emergency’s end in 1998.
President Chiluba survived that round. He did not survive the next one: in 2011, after fourteen years of MMD incumbency and a governing style that had curdled into exactly this kind of reflex, voters replaced it with President Michael Sata’s PF.
The PF tried it too. It also didn’t work.
On 21 June 2016, weeks before an election, President Lungu’s government shut down The Post, the country’s leading independent newspaper, over a disputed tax bill it had almost finished paying, and arrested its editor-in-chief, Dr Fred M’membe, as he tried to keep the paper publishing from wherever he could.
The following year, President Hichilema himself was dragged from his home and charged with treason after his motorcade allegedly failed to give way to the president’s.
Protests over his detention spread at home and abroad. He was released, the charge dropped - and less than four years later, PF was voted out and President Hichilema became president promising, implicitly and often explicitly, that Zambia would not have to live like this anymore.
So when this same government - led by a man who was himself jailed on a fabricated charge, whose own party once marched in solidarity outside a padlocked newsroom - turns to closed courts, arrests without charge, and passports cancelled without stated grounds, it is not innovating. It is reaching for the identical playbook that ended both of its predecessors.
Fourteen years of MMD and ten years of PF did not teach Zambia’s political class that repression buys time, not survival. They apparently did not teach UPND either - despite UPND having more reason than anyone alive today to know exactly how this playbook ends, because it was written on their own skin.
And that is what makes this moment feel less like governance and more like payback. Not policy born of confidence, but grievance dressed as security.
The years UPND spent watching its leader denied bail, its rallies broken up, an independent newspaper padlocked and its editor arrested, seem to have produced not a resolve to do differently, but an appetite to do it back - with the state machinery now finally in its own hands.
That is a human impulse. It is also, historically, a fatal one, because it hands the next opposition the same grievance the UPND itself once carried into office.
Now to the skeptics and vuvuzela’s arguments.
“This isn’t the same. The Kafwaya raid followed a real coup plot, and governments are entitled to investigate that.”
Perhaps, but the Chiluba precedent is instructive here too: a real coup attempt in 1997 was also used to justify jailing people who had nothing to do with it, and history did not judge that arrangement kindly.
A genuine security threat justifies investigating the plot. It does not, on its own,justify closing the courts to a losing candidate’s election petition, or holding hundreds of ordinary supporters past the legal limit without charge.
“National security doesn’t require public disclosure of intelligence.”
True, as a general principle. But Zambia’s own Passport Act requires the holder to be told the reasons and given a right of appeal. By Dr Sishuwa’s own account, he received neither. That is not a state protecting sensitive intelligence. That is a state that has not followed its own law.
“Election disputes belong in court, not on the street.”
Also true - which is precisely the complaint. The courts were the mechanism available, and the courts were closed to the challenge. You cannot insist a grievance be litigated and then lock the courthouse.
None of these counterarguments actually rescues the pattern. It is all bullshit.
They only confirm how familiar it is: every repressive Zambian government has had a reasonable-sounding justification ready at the moment historians later filed it as an overreach.
None of this means the road ahead is short, or that repression does no damage while it lasts.
People are in cells right now who should not be. A family is grieving Mutotwe Kafwaya without the independent answers they are owed. A scholar is stranded, unable to work, for the crime of writing what he actually thinks.
Fragility does not mean harmless. Glass is fragile, and glass still cuts on its way down.
But fragile is what it is - and Zambia has the receipts to prove it.
A Mbunda proverb states that you cannot walk into a field of thorns and still expect to harvest soft cotton.
Every tactic in use right now is not a demonstration of strength. It is an inventory of everything this government is afraid to test in open argument, borrowed wholesale from three administrations that tried it but ultimately lost power.
President Hichilema and the UPND are literally following a failed path.
The pen is still moving. The letters are still being written, publicly, by name, with the exact legal citations that make them impossible to dismiss.
UNIP fell. MMD fell. PF fell.
Each one believed, while it held the machinery of arrest, that it had found the exception to a rule the rest of the country’s history had already proven. None of them had.
There is no reason to believe this one has either - least of all a government that was on the receiving end of exactly this lesson less than a decade ago, and somehow still needs to be taught it again.