Zim Journalist Hopewell Chinono castigates Hichilema for jailing insultant  Ethel Chisono Edwards

Hopewell Chinono Wrote;

When Hakainde Hichilema was still the opposition leader in Zambia, he positioned himself as a defender of democracy, a champion of freedom of expression and a reformist who would dismantle the repressive laws enacted under Edgar Lungu.

One of the laws he attacked most fiercely was the Cyber Security and Cyber Crimes Act, passed in March 2021. Hichilema repeatedly told Zambians that this law was designed to spy on citizens, muzzle dissent and criminalise criticism of those in power.
Today he Is sending people to jail using the same law, his social media army Is twerking to the very thing he used to attack.

On 26 February 2021, months before the election, Hichilema warned in a public statement that the Cyber Bill was “not about cyber bullying at all,” but simply a tool to clamp down on freedom of expression and expand state surveillance over private citizens.
He was emphatic that this law was dangerous, undemocratic and intended to intimidate government critics. To him, it symbolised everything that was wrong with the Lungu administration.

A few weeks later, in March 2021, Hichilema went even further. He told Zambians that the Cyber Security Act was a “bad law,” and he promised that the first task of a new UPND government would be to repeal it. He made this commitment publicly and repeatedly. It was one of his biggest campaign promises, tied directly to his pledge to restore freedom, end repression and usher in a new, more tolerant political culture.

When he got into power, there was no attempt to remove the law. In fact, he immediately started using the very same law that he had criticised when he was an opposition leader. This is very unfortunate because it puts Africans in a difficult situation where they cannot trust what opposition leaders say anymore. They say one thing when they are in opposition, and when they get into power, they do something completely different.

This behaviour is not new. Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe did the exact same thing. When he was in Mozambique fighting the Ian Smith regime, he fiercely condemned repressive laws like the Law and Order Maintenance Act and many other colonial statutes.

Yet when he came into power in 1980, he quickly turned around and used those very same laws to silence, arrest and brutalise his critics. The Gukurahundi genocide against the Ndebele people was carried out under the pretext of the same laws Mugabe had once denounced as oppressive.

And just like Zimbabwe in those years, Hakainde Hichilema now benefits from the same cycle of blind loyalty. When he was criticising Edgar Lungu for passing this cyber law, his supporters cheered him loudly.

Today, those same supporters cheer again as he uses the very law they claimed to despise. They appear on social media platforms, including my own, defending the same repressive tools they used to condemn under Lungu.

They are spineless. They do not have a value system. They do not follow ideas. They are not guided by principles. They simply follow Hichilema the man, not any philosophy or democratic belief.
This is the tragedy of African politics, where the personality becomes the idea. The leader becomes the ideology. And the moment a leader becomes the ideology, accountability dies.

So if Hichilema commits a crime today in Zambia, they will defend him, not because he is right, not because the idea is right, but because to them he is the idea.

As I have always said, the tragedy of African politics is that, unlike on other continents where personalities are a rarity and people focus on issues that affect their families and communities, in Africa supporters and sycophants will defend anything a political personality does, regardless of how wrong that person is. We see it in Zimbabwe, we see it in Zambia, and we see it across many parts of the continent. There is no idea being pursued, no ideology, no principle, no value system. It is simply blind loyalty to an individual, and that is why Africans continue to live in abject poverty.

If an individual comes and hands out chicken and chips, they will support him. Yet chicken and chips is not an idea. It is not a vision. It does not build a country. But they will still support that person, and that is the tragedy that has now taken root in Zambia as well.

Just recently, Hichilema sent two people to prison for witchcraft, Leonard Phiri and Jasten Mabulesse Candunde, claiming they wanted to bewitch him. This is a president who calls himself a Christian, yet he is applying eighteenth-century superstition as if it were modern law and weaponising it to jail citizens. A Christian president, in 2025, using witchcraft allegations to silence critics. It is as absurd as it is alarming.

Hichilema, who some might now start calling the Zambian dictator, is proving through his actions that such a description may no longer be an exaggeration.