The Dilemma of Mourning a Former Minister and an Alleged Militia Member

Zambia has spent the past ten days trying to hold two accounts of Mutotwe Kafwaya in its head at once, and finding that it cannot quite manage it. In one account, he is a decorated public servant: elected Lunte MP in 2016, appointed Minister of Works and Supply and later Minister of Transport and Communications under President Edgar Lungu, a man whose death drew condolences from the Socialist Party president, a home visit from a rival presidential candidate, and formal calls for an independent investigation from the Law Association of Zambia and the Foundation for Democratic Process.

In the other account, offered by government, he was found on the premises of what security officials have called a suspected militia camp, "involved in insurgency," in possession of "high-grade" weapons, under investigation, alongside eleven others, for offences including treason. Zambia is being asked to mourn a man it is simultaneously being told may have been part of an armed plot against the state. That is not a comfortable position for a country to be in, and it is worth asking why.

WHAT, EXACTLY, IS KAFWAYA ACCUSED OF?

The honest, precise answer is: nothing, formally. The eleven people arrested at the Kabulonga residence on the night of 14 August, George Chisanga, Bishop Trevor Mwamba, Patrick Mwansa and eight others, face treason-related charges that will, in time, be tested in court. Kafwaya is not among them. He died that night, and because he died, no charge has ever been, or ever will be, formally brought against him. The "militia" label that has attached itself to his memory is not a legal finding. It is government's characterisation of the group and location he was found in, applied to a man who cannot respond to it, appeal it, or have it tested by a judge.

This distinction matters more than it might first appear. Zambia's own commentators have made the point sharply. One widely read analysis published this week noted plainly that "being a former commando, retired police officer, opposition member or person present at a particular residence does not, without further evidence, establish membership of a militia." Kafwaya's own extended family went further, issuing a statement rejecting the characterisation outright as "false, misleading and gravely prejudicial." Brian Mundubile, who says he was in the room when Kafwaya was shot, has been categorical: "There was no militia. There is no militia." He argues that the people around his campaign had undergone legitimate close-protection training, and that possessing security skills is being recast, after the fact, as evidence of insurgency.

None of this proves government's account wrong. Officials say firearms, ammunition, tactical equipment and electronic devices were recovered from the property, and that the operation followed years of surveillance. Those are serious, specific claims that a court, not a newsroom or a grieving public, is best placed to weigh. But it does mean that "alleged militia member" and "former minister" are not, in fact, two verified facts sitting in tension. One is an established biography. The other is an unproven accusation against a man who is no longer able to contest it.

WHY THE DISCOMFORT ITSELF IS REVEALING

There is a useful, if uncomfortable, lesson in how quickly the "militia" framing reshaped public conversation about a man whose ministerial record was, days earlier, uncontested. One columnist, writing in the Zambian Observer this week, described the mechanism precisely: "Political societies do not suddenly become intolerant. They become intolerant gradually. First, opponents become fools. Then traitors. Then enemies. Then threats. Eventually, extraordinary treatment of them begins to seem normal." The argument is not that Kafwaya was innocent, that remains genuinely unknown, but that a society which allows an unproven label to retroactively overwrite a man's public record, without waiting for the process the law itself demands, has quietly changed the rules for everyone who comes after him too.

This is precisely why the presumption of innocence exists as a legal principle rather than a moral judgment about any particular defendant's character. It does not require anyone to believe the eleven men now facing treason charges are innocent. It requires the state, and the public, to withhold the verdict of guilt until it has actually been earned through evidence tested in open court. Extending that same standard to a dead man who will never have his day in court is not naivety. It is consistency.

MOURNING AND ACCOUNTABILITY ARE NOT OPPOSITES

The instinct to treat sympathy for Kafwaya's family and scrutiny of the security operation as mutually exclusive, as though grief for the man requires either full acceptance or full rejection of government's account, misunderstands what both mourning and accountability actually demand. A family can grieve a husband and father while a nation separately insists on knowing exactly how he died.

Zambians can hold open the possibility that government's intelligence was accurate while also demanding that the specific, individual question of whether Kafwaya himself did anything unlawful be answered with evidence rather than assumed by association. These are not contradictory positions. They are, in fact, the only intellectually honest ones available, given how much about this case remains genuinely unresolved: the shifting official statements in the five days before his death was confirmed, the unanswered question of exactly what happened inside that room, and a "militia" characterisation that has so far been asserted rather than demonstrated.

Zambia does not need to decide, this week, whether Mutotwe Kafwaya was a victim, a bystander, or a participant in something genuinely dangerous. It needs only to insist that the answer come from a courtroom rather than a press statement, and to notice how uncomfortable it has felt, these past ten days, to be asked to skip that step.