10/09/2026
IT IS DIALOGUE THAT FREED HH FROM A TREASON CHARGE IN 2017, NOT THE COURTS OF LAW.
In April 2017, Mr Hakainde Hichilema, then leader of the opposition UPND, was arrested and charged with treason. He spent four months in prison. His trial was set to begin. And then, on 16 August 2017, the state entered a nolle prosequi, formally discontinuing the case, and Mr Hichilema walked free. His treason case was never tried. It was never decided by any court. It simply ended, through dialogue.
That outcome did not happen by accident. Catholic Church bishops, led by the Lusaka Archdiocese, pushed for weeks to broker dialogue between President Edgar Chagwa Lungu and Mr Hakainde Hichilema. When that domestic effort stalled, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Patricia Scotland, intervened directly, meeting separately with both leaders and securing their commitment to a dialogue process. That process began, by design, with Mr Hichilema's release from custody. Days later, the state discontinued the case entirely.
President Lungu did not have to accept that path. He could have insisted the charge run its full course through the courts. He could have argued, as some UPND voices are arguing today, that a man accused of treason had no business being released into dialogue before the justice system had spoken. He chose differently. He listened to the church, accepted the involvement of an international mediator, and allowed dialogue, not a courtroom verdict, to resolve one of the most tense political standoffs of his presidency.
Today, Zambia finds itself in strikingly similar territory. The 13 August 2026 general election was heavily contested. In its aftermath, the country has seen court closures, a security operation that left a former minister dead, and treason charges brought against the losing presidential candidate, his running mate and 18 others. Church mother bodies, civil society organisations, the international community, and political leaders both within and outside Zambia have called, once again, for national dialogue to hold the country together as one Zambia, one nation. These calls deserve support, and the President should take the same kind of leadership role that dialogue once required of his predecessor on his behalf.
Yet a number of named individuals within the UPND have taken the opposite position, dismissing calls for dialogue and using the treason charges themselves as the reason dialogue cannot happen, framing those accused as criminals undeserving of a seat at the table. This is worth pausing on, because it is precisely the logic that could have kept Mr Hichilema in prison in 2017, and it was rejected then, including by the very government he now leads.
It is worth remembering plainly: President Hakainde Hichilema is, in a very literal sense, a beneficiary of national dialogue. He was formally charged with treason. He did not have his day in court to clear his name, because dialogue made that unnecessary. The charge was dropped not because a judge examined the evidence and ruled in his favour, but because political and church leaders, both domestic and international, decided that the country's stability mattered more than pursuing that particular prosecution to its conclusion.
If that reasoning was sound in 2017, on what basis is it unsound today? If a treason charge did not disqualify Mr Hichilema from being brought into dialogue and ultimately released, it is difficult to see the principled argument for why his own political opponents should be treated differently now. To argue otherwise is not a legal position. It is a double standard, applying one rule when it benefited him and a different rule now that the roles are reversed.
Zambia does not need another prolonged political standoff, resolved years later after irreparable damage to public trust and the country's international standing. It needs what worked before: leaders willing to set aside the temptation to let a legal process become a political weapon, and to instead sit down, talk, and find a way forward that keeps the nation whole.
President Hichilema knows, better than almost anyone else in this country, what dialogue can do. He is living proof of it. It is time that lesson informed how his own government responds to the calls for dialogue now being made in his name.
Thompson K. Luzendi
BM8 Presidential Campaign Team Member
