The Editor Zambia
By any serious measure, the latest intervention by Sishuwa Sishuwa is not analysis but agitation dressed up as scholarship.
What is presented as a probing question is, in truth, a reckless indulgence in conjecture one that lowers the tone of public discourse and insults the intelligence of its audience. 
To suggest, even obliquely, that President Hakainde Hichilema or his “agents” sought access to the remains of Edgar Lungu for “ritual purposes” is not merely speculative it is an extraordinary claim devoid of evidence and unworthy of serious commentary.
Such language belongs to the realm of rumour and superstition, not the pages of reasoned political critique. One expects higher standards from those who trade on academic credentials.
The legal position, inconvenient though it may be to the author’s narrative, is far more grounded. The ruling of the Pretoria High Court affirmed that the remains should be released to the Zambian government. That is not “body-snatching”; it is the execution of a court-sanctioned process.
To characterise lawful compliance as a clandestine operation is either a wilful distortion or a troubling misunderstanding of basic legal procedure.
Equally hollow is the insinuation that the funeral of a former Head of State should be subject to personal veto. State funerals, by their very nature, transcend private grievances. They are matters of national significance, governed by protocol and collective dignity, not by selective attendance lists drawn up to satisfy political resentments.
What emerges, then, is not a defence of familial wishes but a thinly veiled attempt to personalise a national moment.
The question posed whether the sitting president should pledge absence misses the point entirely. Leadership is not exercised through theatrical withdrawals but through adherence to institutional responsibility, however uncomfortable that may be.
There is, finally, a broader concern. When public intellectuals abandon rigour for insinuation, they do more than mislead; they legitimise a culture in which hearsay competes with fact.
Zambia deserves better than commentary that trades in whispers while masquerading as wisdom.
If this is the standard of argument now on offer, it is not the government that stands in need of scrutiny but the quality of critique itself.
