When ‘following procedure’ becomes a death sentence: Police ‘call-outs’ and the gaps in Zambia’s GBV justice system
By Mehluli Malisa Batakathi
ON the afternoon of 8 July 2026, the tree-lined calm of Makeni Villa in Lusaka was shattered by the sound of gunfire that would wound the national conscience. Theresa Nyambe, a 43-year-old Health Management Information Systems Officer at Levy Mwanawasa Teaching Hospital, had done everything the system asked of her.
Two days earlier, she had reported her husband, Clifford Chileshe, to Kanyama Police Station after he allegedly assaulted her, leaving her with a cut lip, swollen eyes, a bleeding nose and body pains. She was issued a medical report form and a case was opened. When she returned to the Victim Support Unit (VSU) to follow up, officers handed her a call-out notice requiring Chileshe to appear at the police station and she was expected to deliver it to him herself.
Accompanied by her younger brother, lawyer and human rights advocate Innocent Nyambe, she travelled to the couple’s Makeni Villa home to serve the document. Shortly after their arrival, Chileshe allegedly shot Innocent, then shot Theresa outside the house, before going back inside and shooting himself. Three people dead within minutes, a family eviscerated and innocent children left to grow up in the shadow of institutional failure.
The deaths of the trio have ignited an uncomfortable, yet unavoidable, national conversation: what legal basis, if any, permits police to task a domestic violence complainant with personally serving a call out to the very man she had accused of assaulting her?
What is a ‘call-out’ and where does it come from?
A police ‘call-out’ (sometimes called a call-out notice or summons) is an administrative instruction, issued mainly through Victim Support Units, requiring a suspect to report to a police station to respond to a complaint, in lieu of an immediate arrest. It is distinct from a court summons issued under the Criminal Procedure Code, and it is not a term defined or regulated anywhere in Zambia’s principal criminal statutes.
The Zambia Police Act, Chapter 107 of the Laws of Zambia, sets out the general powers and duties of officers, that is, to prevent crime, apprehend offenders, and execute lawful orders and warrants. It is the duty of every police officer to promptly obey and execute all orders and warrants lawfully issued by any competent authority, to prevent offences, and to apprehend all persons whom the officer is legally authorised to apprehend and for whose apprehension sufficient grounds exist. The Act also formally creates Victim Support Units within the Service, whose function is to provide professional counselling and support to victims of crime.
The Criminal Procedure Code, Chapter 88, is more instructive on arrest powers than on summonses. It empowers any police officer to arrest without a warrant a person reasonably suspected of a cognizable offence, someone who commits a breach of the peace in the officer’s presence, or a person suspected of possessing stolen property. It follows that, domestic assault causing injury is a cognizable offence. This means that, in a case like Theresa’s, where a medical report already documented visible injuries, the law clothed police officers with the power to arrest Chileshe outright rather than route a notice through his accuser. Nowhere in either statute is a victim assigned the role of serving legal process on her own alleged attacker.
The Anti-Gender-Based Violence Act No. 1 of 2011 goes further in the opposite direction. It obliges police officers and other frontline responders who receive information about an act of GBV to inform the victim of her rights, help her access shelter, medical treatment and legal services, and advise her on how to lodge a complaint and the protective remedies available under the Act. The Act’s central protective tool is the protection order, obtainable through the courts with police assistance, which can bar an abuser from contacting or approaching a victim, the opposite of forcing a victim into direct contact with him.
In assessing risk, courts are even directed to consider any prior failure by police to respond to warnings. Therefore, the call-out practice, as applied in the Nyambe case, sits uneasily beside and arguably in direct tension with, this statutory duty of protection, and under section 2(2) of the Act, where any inconsistency arises between the Anti-GBV Act and other written law, the Anti-GBV Act is meant to prevail.
In short, there is no statute, regulation, or published Zambia Police Service standing order that has been publicly identified as authorising the practice of handing a GBV complainant a notice and sending her to deliver it to her abuser. It appears to have developed as informal administrative convenience rather than considered policy.
The numbers behind the names
The Ministry of Gender’s (now Gender Division, Cabinet Office) GBV Statistics Returns between 2020 and 2025, document a crisis in full acceleration. Zambia recorded 42,965 GBV cases in 2023, rising from 33,536 the previous year, an increase of nearly 28% in a single year. In 2024, the figure stood at 42,178, with the fourth quarter alone accounting for 12,378 cases, the highest quarterly total in the five-year dataset. Strikingly, women constitute the majority of victims, their share of reported cases peaking at 60.7% in 2024. The 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey delivers perhaps the most arresting statistic of all: approximately one in two women in Zambia have experienced physical, emotional, or sexual violence.
Yet reporting does not beget justice. In 2024, only 4,543 GBV cases were taken to court, against 21,859 that were not. For women specifically, 13,118 cases went unprosecuted that year. The Zambia Police Service VSU’s Third Quarter 2025 analysis recorded 9,899 GBV cases between July and September 2025, with Lusaka Province topping the national count. The difference between what is reported and what is prosecuted is not just a gap, it is a gulf. And straddling that gulf, with no legal sanction and no institutional accountability, is the call-out practice. An Afrobarometer survey found that 51% of Zambians still regard domestic violence as a private matter rather than a criminal one. The call-out practice, by sending victims back into the domestic space as messengers for the State, reinforces precisely this dangerous misconception.
The inherent danger, and the Law Association’s response
The risk is self-evident and now tragically proven. A call-out strips away the buffer that arrest, court summons, or police-executed service would normally provide, placing the victim, often already in a volatile, escalating situation, back in physical proximity to her abuser, frequently alone or with only informal support such as a family member, and without any protective escort.
Domestic violence is not merely periodic assault. It is a pattern of coercive control in which danger escalates at the precise moment a perpetrator perceives they are losing that control. To warn a suspect that a complaint has been filed, through the hands of the very person who filed it, is to light a match in a room soaked with kerosene. The call out forewarns, it exposes and it re-victimises. In the Nyambe case, it may have contributed to the conditions under which Theresa and Innocent died.
The Law Association of Zambia (LAZ) has called on police to immediately discontinue any practice requiring victims or complainants to personally serve police call-outs, notices, or summons on suspects in GBV or other violent-offence cases. LAZ stated that if reports of the practice were accurate, it was wholly inconsistent with the Zambia Police Service’s primary duty to protect life and property and safeguard those who seek its protection.
LAZ further referred to Article 12 of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to life, arguing this imposes a corresponding obligation on the State to take reasonable and effective measures to protect people whose lives or safety are under threat. The Zambia Police have since launched an internal investigation into the conduct of officers who handled the complaint, to determine whether established procedures, professional standards and the law were followed.
What must change
Zambia is a State Party to CEDAW (Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) and the Maputo Protocol, both of which require the exercise of due diligence in preventing, investigating, and punishing gender-based violence. That obligation begins at the police station counter. The following reforms are non-negotiable
- Legislate an explicit prohibition: Parliament or the Inspector-General should issue a binding standing order, ideally anchored in an amendment to the Anti-GBV Act or the Police Act, expressly barring officers from requiring complainants to serve call-outs, notices or summons on GBV suspects.
- Mandate police-executed service: Where a call-out is used instead of immediate arrest, service should be the statutory responsibility of the police, ideally accompanied by a risk assessment and, where indicated, an armed or paired escort.
- Prioritise arrest and protection orders over call-outs in GBV cases: Given existing arrest powers under the Criminal Procedure Code for cognizable assault, and the protection-order mechanism under the Anti-GBV Act, call-outs should be a last resort, not a default, in cases involving documented injury or firearms in the home.
- Institutionalise risk screening at VSUs: Every GBV complaint should trigger a standardised danger assessment (prior violence, weapons access, escalation pattern) before any decision on arrest versus notice is made.
- Independent oversight and transparency: The findings of the internal inquiry into the Nyambe case should be published, and an independent police oversight body should review GBV-response protocols nationally, not station by station.
- Victim-centred training: Officers, particularly at VSUs, need mandatory, recurring training on victim-centred policing, so that administrative convenience never again substitutes for protection.
Theresa and Innocent Nyambe followed every step the law and police procedure asked of them. That the process itself delivered them into danger is the clearest possible argument for reform. Theresa and Innocent deserved better, so does every woman who, even now, sits across a desk at a Victim Support Unit hoping that the law will stand between her and the person who threatens her life.
THE CALL OUT MUST END NOW.
The Author is a Constitutional Lawyer, Lecturer and Governance Activist, he writes the “Law in Plain Language” Column as a public civic education initiative.
