Abductions, Enforced Disappearances, and Unlawful Detentions: Zambia’s Descent into State Lawlessness
By Sishuwa Sishuwa
Zambia is on a knife-edge only several hours before voters head to the ballot box on 13 August to choose political leaders in a general election that might see Hakainde Hichilema becoming the latest casualty of the anti-incumbent election wave that has recently seen the defeat of sitting presidents in other African countries such as Botswana and Malawi. As I show in greater detail below, Hichilema is racing into the final days unfettered by any rules and willing to do anything he want to steal the results.
People’s rights are being arbitrarily withdrawn. Abductions, enforced disappearances, unlawful detentions, and political violence instigated by the state and ruling party cadres have characterised the descent into state lawlessness ahead of Thursday’s election.
Those on the receiving end are people who question authority or do much more than what is convenient as well as opposition officials, members, and supporters (perceived or real). The sight of anguished family members pleading to the state to disclose the whereabouts of their abducted loved ones has become very common in Lusaka. A special unit consisting of officers, from the Drug Enforcement Commission, the only body that has pre-signed search warrants, has been assembled to raid houses, arrest political opponents, and forcibly abduct opposition members or sympathisers.
The script is the same: those abducted by armed state agents who move in motor vehicles without license plates, are usually taken to ‘safe houses’, not police stations, which makes it difficult for families to find their illegally detained relatives. Their phones and other electronic devices are confiscated, making it impossible to communicate with the abducted or know what has happened to them. This situation has left many people living in a state of fear and paralysis.
In the last few days, I have spoken to civil society activists such as Brebner Changala, prominent personalities like Mulenga Kapwepwe, and at least 14 journalists who have all resigned themselves to any possibility. “We are just waiting for our turn. We do not know when we will be abducted and where we will be taken. When you are no longer able to reach us, just know that we have been taken”, one of them told me.
The profile of those abducted is largely the same: opposition members and innocent people suspected to be supporting or financing Brian Mundubile, Hichilema’s main rival in the election. Nearly all of them are being arrested daily without following due process. Many of these people have been abducted from their homes or the street rather than being summoned to the police, charged, and either issued with bond or taken to court within the prescribed legal time-frame.
Musa Mwenye, one of Zambia’s most outstanding citizens who, as Attorney General, defended the Constitution in 2014 when ministers wanted to overthrow it, captured the state of things in the country when he published the following observation on 10 August:
“When people are held in detention beyond the reach of the courts, contrary to the law and due process, they are being held ‘extra judicially’. Further, when people are detained for their political activities and mobilization, they are ‘political detainees’. Do we have political detainees who are being held extra judicially in Zambia today? Sadly, the answer is yes. I never thought I would ever utter the words, ‘political detainee’ and ‘extra judicial detention’ in one sentence with regards to democratic Zambia, whose democratic credentials have been a beacon of good governance and the rule of law in Africa and beyond.
In the past, when persons were detained for their political activities, the accused persons were subjected to due process in courts of law. We are now witnessing detentions without even the pretension of any court process, whatsoever. This is not who we are, and, it is certainly not what we should be known for. Zambia’s well-earned name in observance of human rights and our democratic credentials is in serious jeopardy. I appeal to the Government to release all political detainees who are being held extra judicially or to present them before courts of law for the due process of the law to take its course.”
On the same day, Amnesty International released its latest report on the state of human rights in Zambia. Titled “Authoritarian practices eating away at human rights in Zambia: Escalating crackdown on human rights ahead of the 2026 general elections”, the mild but relatively critical report details how the Hichilema administration has presided over “an alarming regression into authoritarian practices that undermine human rights and participation in government”, leading to “a climate of fear and impunity”.
To read Amnesty’s report, click here: https://amnesty.org/en/documents/afr63/1356/2026/en/
A coalition of 11 civil society organisations has become the latest interest group to raise alarm about this deteriorating state of democracy. The civic bodies detailed major concerns that undermine the integrity of the electoral process. These include the restrictions on opposition mobilisation, the unequal treatment accorded to the competing contestants by state institutions, the use of public resources for partisan advantage, the unchecked electoral violence, and the late/unclear guidance on valid ballot marking.
They further called on the electoral body to “act with visible impartiality”, on Hichilema to stop the “use state resources for partisan gain”, and on “the police [to] hold perpetrators of violence accountable – regardless of political affiliation”. Unfortunately, their call has come too late and is unlikely to meet positive reception from the authorities. As one of Hichilema’s presidential aides regularly tells some of us, ‘You can cut my finger: HH is going nowhere. It is high time you started working with him.” Given that impunity and lawlessness appear to be Hichilema’s governing principles, it is easy to see where the aide’s confidence is coming from.
Much of this “climate of fear and impunity” has been created by the authorities as part of a wider effort to save Hichilema from electoral defeat. The actual details behind the effort are as chilling as they are alarming. A prominent local businessman and one of my closet friends, Stelios Sardanis, was murdered on 9 August in his house a few days after he shared fears that his life was in danger because ‘they are accusing me of financing the opposition’. Masked men came from the bush, attacked him, and vanished in the same bush. Another prominent local businessman, Valden Findlay, has been in unlawful detention since 4 August without charge! Like many of those abducted, Findlay is being kept in a shipping container in Mwembeshi, not in any prison system, or police station. His crime? Suspicion that he is financing the opposition.
Only last night, nearly the entire top leadership of Mundubile’s campaign committee was either abducted and taken to unknown places or ordered by the authorities to appear before the police today. Among the affected are Mundubile’s spokesperson George Chisanga, national campaign manager Japhen Mwakalombe, and senior presidential campaign official Sebastian Kopulande (abducted). A day earlier, Mundubile’s media team was abducted and taken to an unknown place. A week before that, on 27 July, Kennedy Kamba, the official in charge of vote protection in Mundubile’s party, was arrested. He remains in detention without charge.
Meanwhile, 32 artists, journalists, and other senior officials in Mundubile’s campaign team were arrested in Western Province during a lawful and peaceful rally that police deliberately disrupted for no reason using tear gas canisters. The arrested were charged with minor offences such as conduct likely to cause breach of peace, but none of them have been given bond or taken to court and consequently remain in unlawful detention, over 600 kilometers away from their families.
More opposition leaders, members and supporters are earmarked for arrest and abduction today, tomorrow, and perhaps beyond. The goal of these abductions, arrests and detentions is twofold: either provoke a reaction that Hichilema can use as a pretext to declare a state of emergency, suspend the Constitution, cancel the election, and arrest even more people, or deprive Mundubile of his core support team that can help prevent industrial scale vote-rigging in Thursday’s election.
In my lifetime, I have watched the end of the one-party state, the reintroduction of multiparty democracy, the protection of presidential term limits, the defence of the constitution from executive-driven manipulation, the election of a Tonga to State House, and the repeated peaceful transitions of power enabled by a professional military that chose non-intervention whenever an incumbent was defeated.
After this week’s election, I remain confident that I will be witness to an even more extraordinary national story: an opposition challenger who overcame enormous obstacles to win power at the first attempt, defeating a president who promoted regionalism, nurtured corruption, eroded democracy, increased poverty, and enabled multinational plunder of the country’s mineral wealth.
I maintain that Hichilema will lose Thursday’s election. Although the president is doing his desperate best to try to steal the vote, I am convinced that he is going, whether he likes it or not. In fact, his desperate antics reveal his fear even at this late hour. As I have said before, the only thing that can save Hichilema from defeat is reckless industrial scale vote-rigging or the pre-ballot death of his main rival.
There are several factors that militate against the opposition in African politics, but the obstacles that have been placed in the path of Brian Mundubile are considerable. This is why I am saying his victory will be extraordinary, given the lengths to which Hichilema has gone to retain power. I have nothing personal against Hichilema. It is just that my professional training empowers me to see things that many others can only see after the event. As early as June 2023, I warned that Hichilema was so desperate to retain power that he had devised a five-point plan which, “if successfully implemented, risks undermining Zambia’s hard-won democracy”.
I identified the plan as consisting of five objectives: containing the Catholic Church; co-opting influential elites from civil society; capturing the two formal institutions that are critical to the management of elections: the Electoral Commission of Zambia and the judiciary; weakening opposition parties; and covering corruption tracks. In the same article, I explained the three reasons behind Hichilema’s early desperation to secure a second term: fear of prosecution, the desire to avoid the embarrassment of losing power after just one term, and the push for a sectarian agenda aimed at entrenching his co-ethnic Tongas in state positions and grossly reducing the influence of the majority Bemba and Chewa ethnic groups in public life.
At the time, few people understood what I was saying. Some said I just hated Hichilema, and not even reason-based evidence to the contrary changed their false perceptions. Others like Hichilema’s fellow ethnic Tongas, led by Dr O’Brien Kaaba, a law lecturer at the University of Zambia, and Dr Priva Hang’andu, a Policy Advisor at the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), rose to the President’s defence, dismissing my concerns about “shrinking democratic space, mounting corruption, political intolerance, and government desperation” as entirely unfounded.
To read my 2023 article, click here: https://africanarguments.org/2023/06/zambia-president-hichilema-five-point-plan-stay-power/
To read Kaaba and Hang’andu’s response in defence of their fellow Tonga, click here: https://africanarguments.org/2023/06/the-zambia-president-hichilema-desperate-plan-to-stay-in-power-a-response-sishuwa/
Well, the passage of time has absolved me and given practical meaning to Thabo Mbeki’s observation that “Empty stomachs can be good or bad teachers. The problem with our African intellectuals is that they too have stomachs, in addition to their excellent brains.” For the sake of Zambia, I wish my 2023 concerns were wrong. I raised them then in the hope that Hichilema, who was elected on a ticket of democratic reform, could change for the better before it was too late. Unfortunately, his transition from a promising reformist to a despot only got worse with time, as I showed two years later in another opinion piece published by the Mail & Guardian several months before Hichilema’s State House team asked the newspaper’s new editors to stop giving me platform.
To read the article in which I examined how the fear of losing power and the financial and political benefits that come with it after only one term in office was evident in President Hichilema’s increasingly panicky and politically suicidal decisions, click here: https://mg.co.za/thought-leader/2025-04-23-zambia-understanding-hakainde-hichilema-s-transition-from-reformist-to-despot/
The “authoritarian practices” and ‘escalating crackdown on human rights” that Amnesty International and others were to only to notice three years later could have been stopped much earlier if many voices had stood up to Hichilema before his autocratic aspirations were emboldened by their silence. The obstacles that Hichilema has placed in Mundubile’s path to power are illustrative of how the president has, over the last five years, repeatedly abused state institutions to systematically destroy organised political opposition and any semblance or vestige of autonomy in formal institutions outside the executive.
There are many obstacles that Hichilema has placed in Mundubile’s path, but I will highlight only 10 here to illustrate the point that the leading opposition challenger has had so many domestic and foreign forces working against him in this election that it is extraordinary that he has made it a competitive contest.
The first obstacle was the limitation placed on Mundubile’s international travel. When he tried to leave the country to mobilise resources for his presidential bid, the state blocked him. He was arrested at the airport, charged with a cyber-related offence, and had all his travel documents and phones confiscated. The latter action means that he has not been able to leave Zambia since March this year as his passport remains with the state. Instead of complaining, he quietly went about his work.
The second obstacle was the restriction on the political party ticket that Mundubile could use to run in the election. After the state instigated divisions in all parties that were perceived as capable of serving as possible vehicles for the expression of his presidential ambition, including the main opposition Patriotic Front (PF) to which he belonged, another opposition party, namely the Forum for Democracy and Development (FDD) offered him a platform. However, the state quickly moved in and, as it had done to other parties, factionalised the FDD to prevent him from running on it. Instead of complaining, he quietly went about his work, ultimately finding a home in the little-known National Reconciliation Party for Unity and Prosperity (NRPUP) on the eve of nominations.
The third obstacle was mere appearance on the ballot. After Mundubile formally presented his credentials to the officials of the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ), what should have been a straightforward acceptance of his nomination papers turned into a long waiting game as the authorities exerted significant pressure on the electoral body to find reason to disqualify his candidature, as was done to several other presidential hopefuls. Instead of complaining, he remained calm throughout this unnecessary attempt at electoral exclusion until the ECZ, hours later, reluctantly accepted his nomination.
The fourth obstacle emerged soon after Mundubile became a presidential candidate. As soon as his campaign took off to a rapturous reception, the ECZ halted it, ordering that no one should conduct meetings that have not been sanctioned by the electoral body. The ECZ subsequently imposed a campaign schedule that required him to start in his strongest constituencies and end in the ruling party strongholds: Northwestern, Western, and Southern provinces. Any keen observer understood the motivation: to arrest whatever momentum his campaign would have built by the time he was arriving in the final three provinces where he was expected to draw the least crowds.
To demonstrate their lack of impartiality, the ECZ decided against issuing any campaign schedule to Hichilema, treating him as President who can go wherever he wants rather than a presidential candidate who, like his rivals, was subject to the same rules. When thousands turned up at Mundubile’s rallies in the first two provinces, the ruling party and the state employed violence in a bid to curtail his campaign activities and provoke a reaction that could be used as a pretext for arresting him. Instead of complaining, he quietly went about his work, even as his campaign vehicles were extensively destroyed by ruling party thugs.
The fifth obstacle is the scarce resources resulting in part from restrictions placed on Mundubile’s capacity to mobilise financial resources for his campaign. Unable to leave the country, he turned to local businessmen for support but nearly all who tried to render a helping hand had their bank accounts frozen or faced threats and intimidation from the authorities.
Others who were merely suspected to be sympathetic to him were arrested and kept in detention without charge (the earlier cited Valden Findlay is a good example here) or murdered in suspicious circumstances by unknown people (As I said, Stelios Sardanis had expressed concern about state-linked threats on his life before he was assassinated!). Instead of complaining, Mundubile quietly went about his work, successfully turning to crowdfunding to raise resources from ordinary citizens who, overlooking their own struggles, injected whatever little money they could afford into his campaign.
The sixth obstacle is extremely limited media coverage. After his candidacy was confirmed, the state blocked any positive coverage of Mundubile in the publicly funded media and while the ruling party used financially rewarding ads to buy almost all the advertising space in the private media, that is in newspapers, television and radio stations. This was in addition to buying influencers and almost the entire music industry to endorse and support Hichilema.
The objective of crowding Mundubile out of media coverage was to help nurture the false narrative that there is no opposition in Zambia. Instead of complaining that he is completely blacked out of coverage by the public media and has much of the private media arraigned against him, Mundubile quietly went about his work, regularly communicating with the public through his social media pages, public rallies, one radio station (Hot FM) and one television station (KBN) – the latter two suffering continued threats and intimidation from the state and ruling party for daring to carry his adverts.
The seventh obstacle was the denial of permission for Mundubile to use the airspace for efficient campaign activities. At the start of his campaign, a known private charter company that should have flown him around the country approached the authorities on his behalf to seek clearance. Its application was however frustrated by the authorities who only said “those above” had denied it. Instead of complaining, Mundubile quietly went about his work.
He undertook all his campaign activities across 116 districts and 10 provinces – minus the places he was unable to visit due to