Recently, the nation woke up to an alarming headline in ex-convict, Richard Sakala’s Daily Nation tabloid declaring thus, “UN sanctions Zambia for rights violations!”
The thrust of this outrageously misleading story was obviously hankered on Emmanuel Mwamba’s (a senior former diplomat in the previous regime) ranting on his Facebook page entitled, “Zambia Removed from the United Nations Human Rights Council.”
In the same offering, Mwamba blatantly and willfully claims that President Hichilema’s stranglehold on the legislature and the judiciary, his government’s attack on democracy, and enabling a shrinking democratic space and the flagrant abuse of human rights especially by the Zambia Police has earned Zambia a boot out of the United Nations Human Rights Council!
As has become fashionable for political upstarts in this country, without taking care to verify the authenticity of this information, another excitable individual, Harry Kalaba, who also happens to have served as the country’s foreign affairs minister, but now struggling to put together a political outfit called Citizens First, immediately jumped on the bandwagon and issued the following misleading statement: “It’s very sad that our country once known as a shining example of a budding democracy that respects human rights is now being relegated to the cesspool of a human rights abuser.”
As the purveyors of such falsehoods gathered around mahogany tables enjoying Cappuccino and patted themselves on their backs for having scored cheap political goes intended to inflict damage on the New Dawn Administration, the United Nations in Zambia responded, fire brigade style, and issued the following statement:
“The United Nations in Zambia notes an inaccurate and misleading story carried in the 13th January 2025 edition of the Daily Nation newspaper alleging that the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHCR) has blacklisted Zambia for alleged failure to uphold human rights standards.”
A check on the United Nations website by this author revealed that there are 47 UNHCR member states of which 13 are African, namely: Cameroon, Eritrea, Gabon, the Gambia, Libya, Malawi, Mauritania, Namibia, Senegal, Sudan, Algeria and Benin.
Since we love to argue with facts, we further took the trouble to study the report on the evaluation of UNHCR candidates for 2025-2027. This report reviews candidate countries seeking election to the UN Human Rights Council for the 2025-2027 term in the vote slated to be held at the General Assembly on October 9, 2024.
The report established that 5 out 19 candidates have poor records and therefore do not qualify: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bolivia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.
On the other hand, 7 candidates had problematic human rights and/or UN voting records: Benin, Colombia, Gambia, Kenya, Mexico, Macedonia and Thailand.
Out of the 19 candidate countries, only 7 qualified to be Council members: Cyprus, Czech Republic, Iceland, Marshall Islands, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland. A full report is available on the UN website.
What do we make of all this?
In his desperate attempts to win favours in the eyes of ba Lungu, Mwamba has reduced himself to a demagogue…..an alarmist; daily concocting and spewing out falsehoods against President Hichilema ‘s government! What our former diplomat has resorted to doing is no longer politics but actually borders on criminality that may set this country on fire; the earlier he’s caged the better! What he is doing actually amounts to seditious practices with a potential to promote rebellion, insurrection, or violence against a duly elected government.
As political/social analysts who critically observe and analyse activities taking place in this country, we are duty bound to report Mwamba to the police for seditious practices so that he can stop whatever he’s doing. Maybe that constitutes part of their PLAN B….only God knows.
Prince Bill M. Kaping’a
Political/Social Analyst
We need patriots, and yellow journalist Mwamba is not one such. As a trained journalist, he should have cared to verify the authenticity of the story.
This fuuul has damaged reputation of LT.
I scrolled down and I saw it’s another demagogue, a dangerous man to our justice system.