KK Memorial Diaries
By Dickson Jere
In police custody, I fell ill. Very ill.
The police chief ordered that I be rushed to the hospital as a matter of emergency. I was breathless and in excruciating pain.
“We don’t want problems in case he dies here,” one of them said, as he signaled for the blue lights car outside the Force Headquarters to pick me.
The interrogations was stiff following my arrest on 8th April 1998, which came four months after I went into hiding hours after the arrest of Zambia’s first President Kenneth Kaunda (KK) in connection with the putsch. I, and KK, were key suspects in the 1997 military coup staged by junior army officers.
Despite other detainees being tortured and brutally treated, the police accorded me rare and respectful treatment – I even ate lunch of the famous Tontos chicken and chips with their leader Emmanuel Nkonde.
“Just cooperate with us. Nothing bad will happen to you,” was the line that kept coming from the four panel of interrogators who kept making turns in talking to me in a huge conference room whose windows were covered with thick dark-blue curtains.
Screams of detainees being “dealt with” by the police in other rooms were audible – probably to warn me of what awaited my fate should I not play ball.
“What else did Dr Kaunda tell you which you didn’t put in the story,” Nkonde, the police commissioner, politely asked me the question for the 11th time.
A the University Teaching Hospital (UTH), I was admitted in the sideward of E22. My captors disappeared without word. Only one officer – armed with the Russian AK 47 assault rifle – remained outside my door. He was an officer stationed at the Police Post within the hospital.
“What did you do?” He posed a question when briefly entered my ward. He intimated to me that his seniors had gone back to “HQ”.
“I need to make contact with the office,” I told him, as he obligedly went to look for cellular phone – a rare luxury those days.
He recognized me and agreed to facilitate my communication.
“The paper that digs deeper…,” he said with a mild laugh, regurgitating the motto of the Post Newspaper.
Four days later – in my sick state – I was seated in front of lawyer Sakwiba Sikota at Central Chambers situated at Chuundu House in Lusaka’s CBD.
“We need to do an affidavit of what transpired at the police,” Sikota, who also acted as attorney for Post Newspapers, told me.
I was smuggled to his office by another versatile lawyer Lucy Sichone who was close ally of KK and UNIP.
We spent half day working on the affidavit, which disclosed all the offers that were given to me to turn state witness against Kaunda.
“They offered me a house and scholarship abroad but I refused,” read part of the affidavit, which I signed and witnessed by someone else before I was handed a copy while the two lawyers kept the others.
In the evening.
I was back in the hospital ward.