The Alliance for Community Action (ACA) has condemned Ministers of Home Affairs and Energy, Stephen Kampyongo and David Mabumba, for ordering police to kill wrongdoers during the Threatened State of Emergency period, without taking them to court.

And UPND whip Garry Nkombo has demanded that Mabumba apologises for giving an unlawful and alarming threat in his debates in Parliament yesterday, saying the Energy minister is known to be a descent man.

ACA executive director Laura Miti observed, in a statement today, that the utterances from the Minsters were inciting extra judicial killings.

“The Alliance for Community Action (ACA) is extremely concerned by the unlawful and alarming threats issued to citizens by two Ministers during the parliamentary debate on the threatened state of emergency. Minister of Home Affairs, Stephen Kampyongo, and Minister of Energy, David Mabumba, threatened citizens with extra judicial killings in the period Article 31 is invoked. Such threats, especially from the Home Affairs Minister who will be responsible for the implementation of the extra powers accorded to Law enforcement agencies in this period, serve only to heighten concern on what the real intentions of government for invoking Article 31 are,” stated Miti.

“They put on display a surprisingly immature and cavalier attitude towards a very serious matter by Ministers. The ACA commends the Deputy Speaker for forcing the Ministers to withdraw the threats on the floor of the House. We further call on the President to censure the two Ministers and assure the nation that the Home Affairs Minister is not issuing unlawful instructions to law enforcement agencies to abuse citizens’ rights which the Minister must know remain in place even under a full state of emergency.”

Meanwhile, Mazabuka Central UPND member of parliament Garry Nkombo says Minister of Energy David Mabumba must apologise to Zambians for suggesting that arsonists should be killed without being taken to court.

And Nkombo says it is not surprising that 85 members of parliament dominated by the PF, voted unanimously to extend the Threatened State of Emergency by three months, in the absence of UPND members yesterday.

“It hasn’t come to us as a surprise because the PF is extremely predictable in the way they do things so we are not surprised at all and we expected that debate to go just the way it did. But what I can tell you now is that the members of parliament have embarrassed the President and if they take what Mabumba said then it will be very embarrassing because we thought he [Mabumba] was a decent man but the things he said were extremely absurd and I am sure that if he has reflected on it he must be apologising for the stuff that he said because it was beneath what most of us though about him,” said Nkombo.

“I think for me the whole country is embarrassed and I am personally embarrassed that the Minister said something like that and I am sure that the President does also have a conscience which can make him to become embarrassed so I will be surprised if the President will say he is not embarrassed by what the Minister said. But again I am not surprised that they [MPs] supported him because it’s in the Presidential prerogative. Otherwise, Mabumba is completely out of rail in my view if he is thinking he was correct and I don’t think that Edgar Lungu’s thinking is that there should be dead bodies all over the streets of this country.”