By 
New Heritage Party (NHP) President, Chishala Kateka, has alleged that “Zambia is sleep walking into a dictatorship” under President Hakainde Hichilema-led government.
Kateka said in the past few weeks the country has had a number of opposition political figures arrested, detained, brutalized and just harassed or intimidated by one wing of the Zambian security forces or another.
The NHP leader said this during a joint opposition leaders media briefing held in Lusaka on Sunday.
She said the party had been warning this nation about the danger that the UPND party in government poses to the unity and peace and future stability of the country by their intoralance to criticism and the growing dictatorship of President Hichilema.
Kateka condemned what she described as cowardly and shamefully primitive strategy by the UPND to intimidate the opposition and Zambian citizens in general into silence and fear so as to have an easy stroll back into power in 2026.
“We call this strategy cowardly and primitive because it has been used before by other failed governments, and dictators but it has failed, in Italy under Benito Musolini the arch-fascist, in Germany under Nazi Hitler, in Chile dictator Augusto Pinochet and Jean- Beadel Bokasa in The Central African Republic, near home in Congo DR, Joseph Mobutu,” she said.
Kateka said the list of shame and failure to cow a determined people by dictators is endless.
She said unfortunately the cost and damage done to individual citizens, even after the dictatorship has been removed from power, is usually irreparable especially where there was serious physical injury or worse, loss of life.
“As for the country, there is the damage to the democratic institutions of governance, and the economy among many. In the worst case scenario, there is the danger of creating a failed state as in some of the countries we have mentioned,” Kateka said.
Kateka said in the case of Zambia, under the UPND regime, the civil society had either being bought, or intimidated into silence, acquiescence and even tacit corroboration, with some of the civil society voices actually cheering on the brutalized and even justifying the barbaric injustices.
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