WHY IS PRESIDENT HAKAINDE HICHILEMA GOING AFTER ARCHBISHOP ALICK BANDA?
By Brian Matambo | Lusaka, Zambia
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?
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 handed over by 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.
Context matters. History matters. Memory matters.
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.
Zambians did not forget.
They also did not forget that when civil society and the Oasis Forum sought to oppose the controversial Bill 7, the Catholic Church was deliberately isolated and vilified, its clergy paraded as political villains, its bishops reduced to unnamed enemies of the State. Ministers were deployed to disparage the Church. It felt, to many observers, like a forced ultimatum. Choose the President, or choose your faith.
Now add to this a record that troubles the conscience of the nation. A government that sued a widow on the very day she was meant to bury her husband, because the President insisted that he alone should preside over the burial of his political nemesis. A government whose leader once dismissed the National Day of Prayer and Reconciliation as irrelevant, while his own ministers derided it as a gathering of wilful sinners. A government that has held the former first family in mourning for seven months, not out of necessity, but out of ego and control.
These are not the actions of humility. They are the habits of power unrestrained by reverence.
It is therefore deeply ironic that those who defend this posture dare to accuse a Catholic Archbishop of Luciferian tendencies. If the term has any meaning at all, it describes pride that exalts itself above all else. It describes power that refuses accountability. It describes authority that weaponises institutions to silence moral resistance.
In Christian theology, those who suffer for speaking truth do not wear the mark of evil. They carry the cost of the Gospel.
Archbishop Alick Banda has not called for insurrection. He has not mobilised violence. He has not abused office. He has spoken, presided, mediated, and prayed. If that makes him a threat, then the problem is not the Bishop. It is the State.
Zambia’s democracy was never meant to be a courtroom without conscience. It was meant to be a covenant between law, reason, and faith. When any one of these is crushed under the weight of ego, the nation begins to fracture.
This moment demands restraint. It demands wisdom. It demands that power remember it is temporary, while faith endures.
A Christian nation is not measured by how loudly leaders invoke God at commemorations, but by how carefully they treat His servants when those servants become inconvenient.
Zambia must choose reason over vendetta, democracy over intimidation, and faith over fear.
