HOME Affairs Minister Edgar Lungu has assured Members of Parliament (MPs) that the application of the Public Order Act is not meant to harass members of the opposition as perceived.
Mr Lungu said in Parliament yesterday that the Act was merely being applied by the Zambia Police Service where it was deemed necessary.
The minister was responding to Solwezi MMD MP Lucky Mulusa who asked him whether it was Government's policy to arrest MPs and their political leaders whenever they visited their constituencies.
Mr Lungu advised Parliamentarians to submit any concerns arising from the application of the Public Order Act to his office for redress, adding that the Law Association of Zambia had already taken a step in addressing the matter through the courts of law.
"May I take this opportunity to inform members who have concerns over the application of the Public Order Act to raise these concerns with my office so that these matters can be addressed," Mr Lungu said.
And Defence Minister Geoffrey Mwamba has dismissed reports that the murder of a headman in Mutuma Village was as a result of an attack by Democratic Republic Congo's Mai Mai rebels.
Mr Mwamba said this in a ministerial statement following a point of order by United Party for National Development Monze Central MP, Jack Mwiimbu.
Mr Mwamba said there was no presence of the rebels in the country.
"On November 22, 2012 at 19:30hours, a report of a murder was received at Chiengi Police Post in which Abraham Chalwe of Chief Puta's area reported that his father Abraham Mumba was murdered by unknown persons.
"The police visited the scene of crime and found the deceased with a deep bullet wound on his back through the spine," he said.
Mr Mwamba assured that the country's borders were safe and that the matter involving the murder was under intensive investigations to bring the culprits to book.
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This is the reason why Zambia will continue to remain backward and underdeveloped. We suffered so much in the one party state dictatorship era due to the likes of Edgar Lungu who blindly supported Kaunda's draconian laws aimed at quashing dissenting views. When 32 UNZA students were detained in 1990 by the Kaunda regime (the writer included), they could not be located by either their parents or guardians for almost one week due to such archaic laws and retrogressive attitudes from the security personnel. At that time the students were already being interrogated by the Special Branch and Office of the President operatives - whilst sleeping on bare floors in the middle of winter. At the time, Zambia was under a state of emergency since independence. Our detention was specifically executed under the oppressive Preservation of Public Security Act, which enabled the security forces to detain Zambians for a period of ninety-days without any formal charges being laid by the state. The right to Herbious Corpus would only come into effect after the ninety-days. Therefore, the Preservation of Public Security Act was a vital deterrent to any would be champion of freedom and democracy. After three months, an individual would have effectively been “sorted out” by the one-party state security apparatus. We fought so hard to make Zambia a democratic country whilst many citizens were frankly cowards. We put our lives on the line for this democracy which is now being eroded by people who had propped up the Kaunda regime. Lungu and his masters should know that we, who had fought for democracy (and expecting no reward for this stance), will not allow our country to be dragged back to tyranny.