LUSAKA, (Reuters) – Zambia’s former mines minister, Maxwell Mwale, was jailed for corruption on Friday, in a rare case that prompted calls for a wider crackdown on graft among public officials.
Mwale, a former cabinet minister in Africa’s second-largest copper producing nation, was sentenced to a year in jail with hard labour after he was found to have interfered in the granting of mining licences to China’s Zhonghui International Mining Group.
Magistrate Lameck Mwale said during sentencing that corruption in Zambia’s government had “become rampant and needs to be stopped”, but Mwale’s supporters said the case was politically motivated. Mwale was an opponent of former president Michael Sata, who died last year and was succeeded by his ally in the ruling Patriotic Front, President Edgar Lungu.
