Why arrest and charge citizens when you are not ready to prosecute them?- Fred M’membe

Instead, what we are witnessing today under this regime is a grotesque and unbridled exhibition of incompetence that heavily borders on pure malice and a calculated abuse of the criminal justice system. To those currently administering our justice system, I give you this piece of advice: do not try to swallow what you can not chew.

As President of the Socialist Party and as a lawyer, I am directly calling out the individuals who have turned our constitutional safeguards into a national embarrassment:

• The Inspector General of Police: You have reduced the Zambia Police Service into an unruly instrument of political intimidation. Under your command, professional policing has been replaced by a lazy, incompetent doctrine: arresting to investigate, instead of investigating to arrest. Your officers drag citizens to cells on sensational, unverified whims, only to spend weeks desperately fishing for evidence that does not exist. This is a severe admission of professional failure.

• The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP): Your office has weaponised the law through malicious overcharging. By clearing half-baked, politically manufactured charges like treason and sedition out of thin air, you are actively bypassing the constitutional right to bail. This is not prosecution; it is persecution. When you realise your office has bitten off more than it can chew, you cowardly run to the courts to drop charges through nolle prosequi.

You are using this mechanism to escape judicial scrutiny for your own administrative ineptitude, leaving victims vindicated but deeply violated without any accountability.

• President Hakainde Hichilema: The buck stops with you. The Inspector General of Police and the DPP act in your name, under your executive authority, and under your watch. You can not distance yourself from the tyranny being unleashed by your appointees. By allowing your administration to use congested detention cells as tools for political containment, you are presiding over the systematic dismantling of Zambia’s democracy.

We all want to live in a peaceful society. Every single one of us has a duty to help the state maintain law and order. But peace can not exist in a vacuum of oppression. We also have an unyielding duty to ensure that we live in a society that is fair, just, and humane. It is our individual and collective duty to struggle for both law and order and true justice. One can not be sacrificed for the other.

This sheer administrative ineptitude is poisoning public faith in our judiciary. When the police and the state prosecution bring half-baked, malicious dockets before the courts, it forces magistrates and judges into a backlog of executive-driven theatre. It drags the reputation of our courts through the mud, turning them into extensions of political malice rather than independent halls of justice.