When Words Become Weapons

The Book of James offers an old warning for a modern crisis: the tongue is small, but it can set a forest ablaze. After a contested election, Zambia is discovering just how quickly loose words can outrun public patience.

Abigail Kabandula, a scholar who has spent more than a decade studying conflict in Somalia and South Sudan, watched Zambia’s 2026 election unfold with mounting unease, not chiefly because of the political contest itself, but because of how casually some quarters flirted with violent language, against a backdrop of reported firearms and machetes seized from individuals allegedly preparing for confrontation.

Zambia has been fortunate. It has absorbed political tension, disputed results and sporadic violence without ever tipping into the full-scale civil wars that have scarred its neighbours. That record breeds a dangerous illusion that war happens elsewhere, to other people. Kabandula’s own experience argues otherwise. At the University of Zambia she befriended a Burundian who had walked, largely on foot, across the continent to escape ethnic slaughter in 1993, unsure if any of his family had survived and unable to go home. Years later, at Meheba Refugee Settlement, she found Hutu and Tutsi refugees still housed apart more than a decade after Rwanda’s genocide the mistrust too deep, even then, for them to live side by side. War, she learned, does not end when the shooting stops. Buildings can be rebuilt. Trust between neighbours is far harder to restore.

That is the lesson James’s counsel offers today: truth must still be spoken, but it must be disciplined and evidenced, never weaponised. A supporter declaring readiness “to die and to kill” is no less combustible than an opponent accusing the state of wanting to “kill people with military weapons” before any claim has faced a courtroom. Both freeze public opinion into camps before the facts have had their say.

Government has alleged armed insurrection and militia activity; opposition figures have called the security response fabricated and political. Contradictory public explanations on both sides including a violent statement first dismissed as artificial intelligence before later being acknowledged as genuine have only corroded trust at the moment the country needs it most.