FTJ, THE STATE AND THE MADAM

 A day or two ago, the Drug Enforcement Commission arrested two Zambians in Lusaka over a suspected gold scam worth $224,000. One of them, a 35 year old Archie McTribouy, caught my attention. The name seemed familiar yet I couldn't quite place it, until I could. 

This isn’t gossip. It’s history. A story of how power, love, and revenge once collided at the height of Zambia’s political drama.

In the year 2000, then President Frederick Chiluba allegedly expelled his second wife, Vera Chiluba, from the presidential home. The reason, reports said, was an affair with a businessman named Archie Malie McTribouy.

What followed blurred the line between justice and vengeance.

Soon after the accusation, McTribouy was arrested and charged with aggravated robbery and motor vehicle theft. He spent over a year in detention, represented by Sakwiba Sikota, before both charges were eventually dropped. Many observers at the time believed the case was politically motivated. A quiet warning from State House that.

But the scandal didn’t end there.

When Vera Chiluba filed for divorce, she demanded what remains one of the most audacious settlements in Zambia’s legal history. An eye watering $2.5 billion. More than three quarters of the country’s GDP at the time. Along with six houses, a farm, and over 400 head of livestock. The High Court dismissed her claims, but the case cemented its place in the country’s legal folklore.

Then another voice entered the picture. Archie’s ex-wife, Tungwa Chanda Malie, publicly accused Vera Chiluba of destroying her marriage. She claimed she had overheard late night phone calls between the two and that Vera had even invited Archie to London.

If it sounds like a political soap opera, the next chapter only deepened the intrigue.

By 2008, reports from Malawi linked Vera Chiluba to then-President Bingu wa Mutharika, less than a year after the death of his wife. Some Malawian publications claimed the two exchanged intimate gifts, stories that reignited cross-border tabloid attention.

Today, Vera Chiluba lives a quiet life with her family and has faced health challenges in recent years.

The story of Archie McTribouy remains one of the most striking intersections of power, scandal, and law in post 1990s Zambia. It revealed how presidential authority could be used to settle personal grievances, and how the machinery of the state was never far from the emotions of those who wielded it.

History remembers it not for romance, but for what it exposed about power and the fragile line between private sin and public consequence.

Author's note: The real moral of the story here is that it doesn't matter who you are, a chola boy or president, ba guy baku dyela.