Death of Constitutionalism — How August 13 Marked a Turning Point for Zambia’s Democracy

Death of Constitutionalism — How August 13 Marked a Turning Point for Zambia’s Democracy

By Oscar Mike Chops

For five days, the Zambian state told the public, implicitly and explicitly, that former Cabinet minister and sitting Member of Parliament Mutotwe Kafwaya could not be found. For five days, his family did not know whether he was alive. When the truth finally emerged, it came not from a government statement volunteered in good faith, but because a court had been asked to compel one.

The sequence of events, now established through official confirmation, opposition accounts and a court filing, has been described by commentators as marking a decisive rupture in Zambia’s constitutional order rather than a gradual decline. What happened in the 48 hours after polls closed on August 13, and in the five days of silence that followed, has become the defining controversy of President Hakainde Hichilema’s second-term inauguration.

The raid

On the evening of August 14, as live vote tabulation was still under way across the country, a heavily armed Joint Task Force entered the private Kabulonga residence of Tonse Pact presidential candidate Brian Mundubile. The unit was made up of elite personnel drawn from the Zambia Army, the Drug Enforcement Commission and the Zambia Police Service.

During the operation, state security personnel opened fire inside the residence. Among those present was Mutotwe Kafwaya, former transport minister and Member of Parliament for Lunte, who sustained multiple gunshot wounds. Eleven other individuals, including opposition political staff, were forcibly apprehended and detained at the scene.

Kafwaya did not survive his injuries.

Five days of silence

What followed was not an immediate acknowledgement of a death in state custody, but an extended period in which senior government representatives explicitly rejected reports of Kafwaya’s death or critical condition.

When Mundubile’s running mate, Makebi Zulu, publicly stated that Kafwaya had been taken to a military health facility with severe chest wounds, officials at the Ministry of Defence dismissed the claim outright, insisting that no record of Kafwaya existed at their facilities.

The blackout held for nearly five days. It was broken only when Kafwaya’s wife, Dinis Ng’andu Kafwaya, filed an urgent habeas corpus application in the High Court of Zambia, a legal instrument that compels the state to produce a detained person before a judge or account for their whereabouts. It is a measure of how completely ordinary channels of accountability had broken down that it took a widow’s court filing, rather than a government press briefing, to force disclosure.

Faced with mandatory judicial scrutiny, Inspector General of Police Graphel Musamba issued an official statement on August 19, finally confirming that Kafwaya had died from gunshot wounds inflicted during the August 14 operation.

Competing narratives

To justify the use of lethal force during a raid conducted while votes were still being counted, state security organs have pointed to an alleged “insurgency plot,” citing the recovery of cash and weapons at the scene.

Mundubile and Zulu have firmly rejected this characterisation. They argue the narrative was constructed to achieve three specific outcomes: to rebrand what they describe as an extrajudicial killing as a response to armed confrontation; to justify non-bailable charges of treason, sedition and espionage against senior opposition figures; and to force principal opposition contenders into hiding or legal detention during the narrow statutory window in which election petitions must be filed.

Whichever account proves accurate through further judicial process, the underlying facts are no longer in dispute. A sitting Member of Parliament died from gunshot wounds during a state security operation conducted at a presidential candidate’s private residence while the country’s votes were still being tallied. His death was denied by the state for five days. It was confirmed only after his widow sought judicial intervention.

A nation left to grieve in silence

The human cost of these events has rippled well beyond the courtroom. Kafwaya was a son of Northern Province, and his killing has become deeply entwined with the region’s collective mourning. The Bemba Royal Establishment, in an unprecedented decision reached during an urgent meeting on Friday night, cancelled the 2026 Ukusefya pa Ng’wena traditional ceremony, one of Zambia’s largest cultural gatherings, citing the region’s grief and the continued detention of prominent political figures from the area.

Former Northern Province minister Chungu Bwalya described the ceremony’s cancellation as entirely justified, noting that holding festivities while a son of the region lay dead and others from the province remained in detention would have signalled indifference to real suffering.

Constitutional stakes

Commentators tracing the sequence of events argue that what collapsed on August 13 and in the days after was not merely a political dispute but a structural safeguard: the presumption that state power, however forcefully exercised, remains answerable to judicial oversight in real time, not five days and a court order later.

Zambia now carries this into its second Hichilema term. Opposition figures Mundubile and Makebi Zulu remain in detention on treason-related charges connected to the same events, their case now moving through the ordinary channels of the courts. Kafwaya’s widow has secured, through legal action, the disclosure the state initially withheld. What remains unresolved is accountability for the raid itself, and for the five days during which the truth was denied.