By Chali Mulenga
The acquittal of Livingstone Mayor Constance Muleabai by the Economic and Financial Crimes Court has reignited an old and uncomfortable national debate: can a judgment be legally correct yet leave the public dissatisfied?
On the face of it, the ruling by Magistrate Trevor Kasanda was firmly anchored in law. The court repeatedly returned to one foundational principle of criminal justice — that the burden of proof lies entirely with the prosecution and that guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt. Where the State failed to meet this threshold, acquittal was inevitable.
From a purely legal standpoint, the judgment is difficult to fault.
The prosecution framed its case around the allegation that the mayor solicited and received money from a specific source. Yet evidence led the court to conclude that the funds passed through intermediaries and were not obtained in the precise manner alleged. In criminal law, the court cannot convict on suspicion or assumption, nor can it amend the prosecution’s case from the bench. The State must prove the case as charged, not as later explained.
Equally, on the second count, the mayor’s defence that she was not present in her office on the material day was not successfully challenged by the prosecution. Once such a defence is raised, the law demands that the State disprove it. The failure to do so left the court with no lawful option but to acquit.
However, legality is not the same as public confidence.
The court acknowledged that money did change hands. It acknowledged communications between the parties. It acknowledged interactions that raised legitimate suspicion. Yet none of this culminated in a conviction. To many citizens, this feels like a gap between lived reality and legal outcome — a space where wrongdoing appears visible but remains legally untouchable.
This is where discomfort sets in.
Corruption cases are rarely neat. They are often built on circumstantial evidence, coded language, intermediaries and informal networks. Critics of the judgment argue that the court adopted an overly narrow interpretation of solicitation, one that may not fully reflect how corruption actually operates in practice. They fear that such strictness, while legally sound, risks turning anti-corruption laws into technical minefields where cases collapse on drafting errors rather than substance.
Yet the court cannot fix investigative failures.
If there is blame to be assigned, it rests less with the judiciary and more with weak investigations and poorly framed charges. Courts are not forums for moral judgments or political expectations; they are instruments of law. When prosecutors fail to align evidence with charges, courts are duty-bound to acquit — even when the outcome is unpopular.
The political reaction to the acquittal further complicates matters. Claims of political persecution and counterclaims of investor betrayal now compete for attention, threatening to overshadow the central institutional lesson: Zambia’s fight against corruption will succeed only if investigators, prosecutors and lawmakers do their jobs with precision and professionalism.
The danger lies in misreading the judgment.
To celebrate it as proof that corruption does not exist would be reckless. To condemn it as proof that courts protect the powerful would be equally unfair. The truth is more uncomfortable: the law worked as designed, but the system feeding cases into the courts did not.
Justice was applied. Whether justice was felt is another matter entirely.
Until the State strengthens investigations, improves charge drafting and treats corruption cases with the seriousness they deserve, similar outcomes will recur — lawful, defensible, and deeply unsettling.
And the public will continue to ask the same question: not whether the court was right, but why the system keeps arriving at such endings.
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