Arrested at dawn in Chienge, charged in Kabwe, bonded by evening: the two-day case against Dr Katele Kalumba

The facts that both sides accept can be told in a single breath. Dr Katele Kalumba — finance minister in the MMD governments of the 1990s, foreign minister after, prisoner on corruption convictions in 2022, and beneficiary of a presidential medical pardon in August 2023 — was picked up at his home in Chienge, Luapula Province, on Wednesday morning, driven hundreds of kilometres south to Kabwe, charged on Thursday with harassment under Section 22 of the Cyber Crimes Act No. 4 of 2025, and released on police bond the same day. He is expected in court in due course.

Everything around that spine is contested. Police spokesperson Godfrey Chilabi says the matter was reported at Kabwe Central Police Station on 10 September by a 29-year-old Kabwe resident, Albert Munjulunji, and that the alleged offence is the publication, on 11 August, of electronic content intended to humiliate President Hakainde Hichilema. Police opened a docket, investigated, and apprehended Dr Kalumba in Chienge on 23 September before formally charging him the following day.

His wife tells the beginning differently. Soldiers, she said, first appeared at Dr Kalumba's lodge — adjacent to the family home — at around 04:00 on Wednesday, and were initially denied access by the chief's retainers. The opposition We Are One Zambia and the Tonse-Pamodzi Alliance seized on the account: secretary general Muhabi Lungu said the former minister had been bundled into a military vehicle and driven across provincial lines without explanation, and that when word of the arrest first spread, ruling-party supporters dismissed it as fake until a recording forced the issue.

Lungu's broader argument is about the map. "Dr Kalumba was transferred all the way from Chiengi to Kabwe because a Kabwe resident allegedly complained," he said. "So, we can speculate that we will all be arrested and transported to a distant district for prosecution as punishment. Same with Mundubile and Makebi. From Kabwe, now Solwezi." He called it jurisdiction used as a weapon, part of what he described as the militarisation of politics — and he went further, accusing the government of having repealed the old offence of defaming the President only to restore it "in a stronger and more punitive form" through the sedition and cyber laws. The arrests, he claimed, are meant to stoke fear, silence dissent and lay the ground for a third term.

The ruling party's answer was aimed at the man rather than the mechanism. UPND deputy spokesperson Elvis Nkandu condemned what he described as disparaging remarks and threats against the President in a video now circulating on social media, believed to predate the election. Freedom of expression, he said, must be exercised with responsibility and respect for the presidency — and he reached for the biography: Dr Kalumba was imprisoned for corruption in 2022 and released in August 2023 after President Hichilema pardoned him on medical grounds. "That act of mercy should never be misconstrued as weakness," Nkandu said.

The charge sits atop a week in which the President himself warned that "the law does not recognise age, it recognises wrongdoing" — remarks made at State House on Friday without reference to any individual case. Dr Kalumba's own most recent public intervention had been of a different register: an appeal to the President to release Brian Mundubile, Makebi Zulu, Xavier Franklin Chungu and others held on political or politically related charges, and to call a conciliatory national indaba. "Let the courts do their work where there are genuine criminal matters," he wrote. "Let political opponents breathe."

Sources: Lusaka Times, "Katele Kalumba Freed On Police Bond After Cyber Harassment Charge" (25 Sep 2026) and "Police Say Kalumba Was Lawfully Arrested…" (26 Sep 2026); Diamond TV (25 Sep 2026); Mwebantu (25 Sep 2026); Zambia Monitor (25 Sep 2026).