I am shocked at the lack of intellectual and historical insight displayed especially by two former presidential spokespersons; Dickson Jere and George Chellah!

What they have commented on Police reserves amounts to intellectual bankruptcy!

Most Zambians are being misled to believe that it is the first time the Zambia Police Service is engaging foreigners as police reserves in the Zambia Police Service; this is intellectual dishonest on the part of some influential Zambians peddling such a narrative.

I beg your forgiveness for taking so long to comment on the Chinese police reserves.

The anger and ignorance you have all expressed is shocking.

This is not the first time that foreign nationals have served as police reservists in Zambia.

We had Lebanese reserves in the second republic. Unfortunately some of them abused the system and run away when MMD took over government.

The most popular anti-robbery policeman was a reservist by the name of Patel. He even helped to cleanse the force of bad cells.
Zambians are also serving elsewhere.

Chewe Munkonge is a Councillor in the city of Birmingham in England.

Zambian lawyer Nkaka Puta is a minister in one of the provincial governments in Canada.
I therefore don’t understand all this hullabaloo you making about four Chinese reservists.

My only complaint is the way the police command welcomed them into the service.

But maybe the Chinese authorities thought it was a good public relations exercise.

Let us learn to think soberly and analytically.

Good systems fail because of bad eggs. The burden to make the police service responsive to all our expectations lies with the Zambians at the helm of the command.

Until the other day when the Police Service announced that it had engaged eight Chinese nationals as police reserve officers, there has never been any known outcry over the engagement of foreign nationals as police reserve officers.

The Zambia Police Service has always had foreign nationals volunteering as police reserve officers within its ranks.

Currently, the police reserves include among other nationalities newly settled immigrants from Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, Greece, Somalia and Zimbabwean white farmers resettled in Zambia, therefore to only single out Chinese nationals out of so many foreign nationalities is being disingenuous and discriminatory; unfortunately, the international media perhaps due to their fixation on reporting anything negative about Chinese presence in Africa is being used to advance fallacious arguments that have only served to evoke anti-Chinese sentiments in Zambia.

The truth of the matter is that like in several other commonwealth countries, it is legal in Zambia for a foreigner to be engaged as a volunteer in the Zambia Police Service; in case of the UK where some of the Zambian laws are derived from, the British Army does not only engage foreign nationals as reserves in its ranks, it also enlists them as regular soldiers and commissioned officers.

There is a distinct difference between a regular police officer and a reserve police officer; the two positions are covered under different pieces of legislation.

The employment of regular police officers is covered under the Police Service Commission while Police Reserves are mere volunteers with limited responsibilities and covered under the Zambia Police Reserve Act, Cap 117 of the laws of Zambia.

Zambian