This photo captures Kenneth Kaunda, the founding father and first President of Zambia, smiling in his Lusaka home on June 2 1998 just one day after being released from state custody.

This photo captures Kenneth Kaunda, the founding father and first President of Zambia, smiling in his Lusaka home on June 2 1998 just one day after being released from state custody. Kaunda was held under state custody because the government accused him of being involved in a failed military coup attempt. Following a botched coup […]

This photo captures Kenneth Kaunda, the founding father and first President of Zambia, smiling in his Lusaka home on June 2 1998 just one day after being released from state custody.

Kaunda was held under state custody because the government accused him of being involved in a failed military coup attempt.

Following a botched coup attempt by junior military officers in October 1997, the government of his successor, President Frederick Chiluba, claimed that the coup plotters intended to hand power over to Kaunda after a three-month transitional military rule.

Kaunda was arrested on Christmas Day in 1997. In early 1998, the state formally prosecuted him, eventually settling on charges of misprision of treason—meaning the state alleged he knew about the coup plot beforehand but illegally failed to report it to the authorities

He was initially locked up in a maximum-security prison. Due to intense local and international pressure from prominent figures like South African President Nelson Mandela and Tanzanian leader Julius Nyerere, Chiluba’s government later transferred Kaunda to house arrest.

Kaunda strongly maintained his innocence, calling the arrest a politically motivated vendetta aimed at sidelining him from politics. On June 1, 1998, the Zambian state dropped all charges against him, and he was released from house arrest.

Source: Tee Saigon of Africa