Anthony Kunda in Lusaka
A witness this week told the Zambian Supreme Court that presidential security personnel threatened to shoot her if she told anyone she had known President Frederick Chiluba by a different name 30 years ago.
Anna Chilekwa, a 52-year-old widow, told the court she was driven from Lusaka to Luanshya by Simon Mumba, in the company of two other State House security men. At Luanshya, she said Mumba told her: “They know your place now. These are the president’s people, they will just come and shoot you.”
Chilekwa testified she had known Chiluba in 1955 as Titus Mpundu. She said Chiluba’s family and hers were neighbours. On the origin of Chiluba’s father, she said: “Jim Zherare Nkhonde never used to hide his origins. He used to say he came from Mozambique.”
According to the Constitution, a person of foreign parentage cannot be state president.
Chilekwa said that in those days, Chiluba fancied people calling him “Titus Mpundu Zherare Nkhonde as he wanted people to know he was the son of the famous herbalist”. She did not see him after 1960 for 25 years. By then he had dropped his childhood name, for unexplained reasons.
Her evidence contradicts that of an earlier witness, Luka Chabala Kafupi, who claims to be Chiluba’s real father and who offered body samples for a secret DNA test carried out in unnamed laboratories in Johannesburg and London.
Kafupi told the supreme court that he made Chiluba’s mother, Daina Kaimbe, pregnant, but her relatives had rejected marriage.
Sakwiba Sikota, one of the six lawyers for the petitioners, said they were using this testimony to seal a possible loophole should the supreme court decide that for legal purposes Nkhonde was Chiluba’s father. This possibility is real: in Chiluba’s election nomination papers last year he named his father as Jim Nkhonde Chiluba.
In a related development, a European human rights body wrote to the supreme court saying the Zambian government intends to interfere with the petitioners’ case against Chiluba.
According to the state-owned Times of Zambia newspaper, Guslavo Joaquin, president of Human Rights in Germany, sent a fax to each of the seven judges urging them to resist government interference. The supreme court has not released the fax. Phillip Musonda, acting chief administrator of the Zambian judiciary, has written to Joaquin saying the faxed letter amounted to contempt of the supreme court.
The fax comes hard on the heels of an election monitoring report compiled by the National Committee for Clean Campaign.
The report says prior to Chiluba becoming president the judiciary exhibited hard- edged independence. But “after five years of democracy, the judiciary seems to be losing credibility. Members of the public and opposition political parties seem to have lost faith in the judiciary.”