The Archbishop, The Hilux and The Kangaroo Court

By Macphersson Mutale
Once upon a time, in a republic where press conferences were louder than facts and investigations moved only when politics whistled, there lived an Archbishop who owned neither cattle posts nor car yards, only a collar, a conscience, and a stubborn habit of speaking uncomfortable truths.

One sunny afternoon, a well-wisher—one of those mysterious African creatures who appear with gifts and no receipts—donated a Toyota Hilux to the Archbishop. The Hilux, sturdy and obedient, bowed its bonnet in gratitude and began its holy work: ferrying the man of the cloth between sermons, funerals, meetings, and moral rebukes directed squarely at the powerful. The Archbishop accepted the gift in good faith, sprinkled no holy water on the logbook, and drove on.

For a year, the Hilux lived a quiet ecclesiastical life. Then something changed.

The Archbishop began to sound less like incense and more like thunder. He spoke of injustice. He frowned at corruption. He reminded Caesar that Caesar was not God. This, unfortunately, is when the ruling class noticed the Hilux—not as a vehicle, but as an opportunity.

And so the Kangaroo Court was convened.
The ruling class, armed with microphones and selective outrage, announced that the Hilux was tainted. The details were not yet important; what mattered was the splash. Mud was scooped generously and flung enthusiastically. Whether it stuck or not was irrelevant—humiliation, after all, does not require convictions.

When informed that the Hilux carried a questionable past, the Archbishop did something profoundly inconvenient to the script: he surrendered it immediately to the Drug Enforcement Commission. No chase. No resistance. No sermon titled “Keep Your Stolen Hilux.” Just a quiet handover.

This, however, confused the Kangaroo Court.
Because investigations—real ones—have a habit of wandering into uncomfortable offices. And indeed, when the dust briefly settled, it emerged that the Hilux had been sold through a sanctioned Zambia Revenue Authority auction. It had been paid for. Paperwork existed. Receipts smiled confidently.

But then came the plot twist.

The buyer, it turned out, was allegedly a ZRA employee who did not actually buy the car. His credentials had taken the Hilux shopping without him. Someone else had gone bargain hunting using another man’s name. Fraud, yes—but not the clerical kind.

At this point, any investigation worthy of its salt would have done the obvious: knock on ZRA doors, question employees, trace the auction trail, interrogate the credential-hijackers, and dismantle whatever clever little syndicate thought identity theft was a procurement strategy.

But the Kangaroo Court had no time for such boring detail.

Instead, it put the Archbishop back in the dock.
Never mind that he had surrendered the vehicle. Never mind that he was not the buyer. Never mind that the fraud, by all logic, lived somewhere between institutional corridors and auction rooms. The story was too good to abandon now. A thief in a collar made better headlines than a compromised system.

So the Archbishop was painted—thickly—as dishonest, criminal, and morally suspect. The paint dripped, but it was applied anyway.

Yes, one could argue the Archbishop made himself a target by accepting a Hilux. But in a world where church leaders receive gifts ranging from sacks of maize to suspiciously generous donations, omniscience is not a standard Christian sacrament. Some gifts come from saints, others from sinners, and occasionally from sinners with very clean logbooks—until later.

If the state had been interested in justice rather than theatre, it might have invited the Archbishop as a state witness. He could have told his simple story, pointed at the gift-giver, and watched investigators follow the trail like proper bloodhounds instead of political lapdogs.
But justice was never the headline.

The real objective was reputational demolition—turning a moral critic into a cautionary tale. And while the ruling class may succeed in embarrassing the Archbishop, they have also succeeded in something far more dangerous: planting seeds of resentment among those who listen to him, pray with him, and believe he speaks for something larger than politics.

The Hilux, meanwhile, sits quietly somewhere, wondering how it became evidence in a morality play it never auditioned for.

And the Kangaroo Court adjourns, satisfied—not because truth has been found, but because the target has been sufficiently bruised.

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