Kambwili, the Hilux, & the Politics of Perpetual Outrage

🇿🇲 VIEWPOINT | Kambwili, the Hilux, & the Politics of Perpetual Outrage

Chishimba Kambwili’s comments on the Drug Enforcement Commission’s summoning of Archbishop Alick Banda are explosive, emotive, and deliberately absolutist. “Nobody in their normal senses would support what has happened,” he declares, framing the DEC action as an attack not just on an individual cleric but on the entire Catholic Church.

It is a familiar Kambwili register. High voltage. Moral certainty. No space for nuance.

But facts matter. The DEC did not summon the Catholic Church. It summoned Archbishop Alick Banda as an individual named in records relating to a Toyota Hilux previously linked to the Zambia Revenue Authority and already forfeited to the state. The Commission has repeatedly stated that the process was routine, investigative, and not a charge. That distinction is not cosmetic. It is foundational in a constitutional system where individuals, regardless of office or faith, may be asked to account for possession of public property.

Kambwili’s argument rests on two claims. First, that the matter should have been handled “behind closed doors.” Second, that gifts to clergy and traditional leaders are normal and therefore beyond scrutiny. Both claims
collapse under closer inspection.

Investigations are not negotiated on the basis of optics, and “normality” is not a legal defence. If anything, Zambia’s recent history of asset stripping, disguised as generosity, is precisely why investigators now follow trails that were once ignored.

The statement “touch one priest, you touch all of us” is politically potent but legally hollow. It deliberately collapses institutional accountability into collective identity. This framing turns due process into persecution and invites confrontation where none is legally required. It is also inconsistent. Clergy across the world, Catholic and otherwise, have been questioned, arrested, and even convicted without those actions being interpreted as wars against faith itself.

Zambia is not inventing a new standard.

There is also an unmistakable political undertone. Kambwili has been largely absent from meaningful national influence since the PF’s electoral defeat. His voice now rises mainly in moments of outrage, not policy. In a PF that is deeply fractured, with competing centres of authority and shrinking organisational coherence, outrage has become a currency for relevance. The louder the statement, the more it travels. But travel is not traction

Public sentiment reflects this shift. Online reaction to Kambwili’s remarks has been divided, with a visible portion of citizens rejecting the idea that religious status confers immunity from questioning. Many Zambians, shaped by years of elite impunity under PF rule, are wary of arguments that sound like a return to “some people must not be asked.” That skepticism is not anti-church. It is anti-exception.

The broader irony is hard to miss. The PF, which presided over years of blurred lines between state assets and private beneficiaries, now frames investigation as oppression. The same political culture that normalised gifts from public institutions is outraged when those gifts are examined. This contradiction weakens the moral force of the protest.
Kambwili is not wrong to argue for respect, dignity, and restraint. Those principles matter.

But they do not cancel accountability. In trying to turn an administrative inquiry into a civilisational clash, he risks confirming what many already suspect: that this is less about protecting faith and more about reviving a political voice that has lost its centrality

Zambia’s democracy does not require silence from law enforcement, nor does it require hysteria from politicians. It requires clarity. On that score, Kambwili’s intervention generates more heat than light.

© The People’s Brief | McCarthy Lumba