By GIDEON NYENDWA
The defamation of the president law should be removed because it gives protection to a bad president, Human Rights Activist, Fumba Chama, has said.
Mr Chama, who is also popularly known as Pilato, said if this country was to have a dictator as a president they would use that law to silence, arrest and detain anyone that disagrees with them.
He said the defamation of the president law has potential to legalize the dictatorial tendencies of a president.
Mr Chama said if this country tolerates this law and in an instance where the president decides to become authoritarian, he would just use that particular law to make his dictatorial tendencies legal.
He said this when he featured on a on ZNBC’s Sunday Interview.
Mr Chama said that presidents in this country like the presidents in other countries are super powerful and the defamation of the president law intimidates people’s public participation in conversations, governance and accountability.
“Bad laws make good people become bad people,” he said.
He said there was no need to create laws that give the president power to become anything that he wanted.
Mr Chama said the Zambian constitution has enough laws that could address the concerns demeaning the president of the land even without the defamation of the president law.
He said this country had given a blank cheque to a sitting president or the party in power to determine what is an insult to him.
Mr Chama said the defamation of the president law was not explicit enough to determine what should be considered an insult or not.
“So whose intelligence does the people who arrest rely on to determine what an insult to the president is or not?” he said.
He said the same applies with the Public Order Act (POA), which must be looked at because a country could not be ruled by a law that was used to rule a group of people who were considered to be inferior.
“You cannot serve a free people on the cutlery that was used to serve slaves,” he said.
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