Calls from fans. Stay with bbc world news. Now on bbc news its time for hardtalk. Welcome to hardtalk. Over the past 25 years, zambia has been a positive example of stable, relatively free and democratic governance in africa. But that cherished status has been jeopardised of late. The country has seen a disputed election, political violence, a state of emergency and the imprisonment of my guest today, the Opposition Leader hakainde hichilema. He was freed last august but still refuses to accept the legitimacy of last years election. Is he destabilising zambia . Hakainde hichilema, welcome to hardtalk. Thank you for having me. It is a pleasure. Not least because you are now a free man. This summer you spent over three months in prison but you were released and you are out. Is it now time to build fences with your political enemies, in particular, the president , edgar lungu . First, i am glad to be out. Nobody should be in prison, especially when you are not imprisoned for committing a crime. So it is nice to be out of prison. I am grateful to all those who did something. No olive branch . I think it is time to fix the broken pieces of democracy in my country. That is how i define it. Very very essential. Lets talk about the incident that got you into prison. Many people around the world will find it quite bizarre. You were in the west of your country on the road with your team, a convoy, when the president ial convoy, motorcade, came through on the same road. You and your team refused to pull over and get out of the way. Which, of course, is expected when a president passes through. Why . Actually, that is not what it was. His motorcade was behind us. We were ahead of him. He overtook notjust my four or 5 vehicles but 100 other vehicles. It is a little bit of a he said, she said story. There are two versions. Lets stick with what the police chief said. He said that it has been established that the Opposition Leader disobeyed Police Orders and thereby put the life of the head of state in danger. Absolutely not true. If that was the case, how is it that other road users were not arrested for treason . Exactly the same conditions when his motorcade passed several hundreds of other vehicles. A couple of days later there was a raid on your home and you are grabbed, your family, it seems, was quite upset by what they saw. You were hauled off to prison and a few days you are held in solitary confinement. Eight days. This is not pleasant. No one could say this was a pleasant experience. The bottom line is you were treated with respect, you were ultimately freed afterjust over three months in captivity. Four months. And a charge of treason that was originally put against you was dropped. Why have you made such a fuss about what happened . First, stephen, ishould never have been arrested. I and five others should never have been arrested because we did not commit any treason. We have gone into that. Can we now discuss what this overall incident tells us about zambia today . As i say, in some countries you may still be languishing in prison. But after a degree of intervention from the outside including from the secretary general of the commonwealth and a degree of compromise, lets put it that way, you emerged from prison and now you are free man who has travelled to london to conduct political work. What is the message of all of this, do you think . The message is that we need to clean up our democratic credentials. The situation in zambia should never allow the citizens to be brutally arrested and detained eight days in solitary confinement, 120 days in total, in prison under degrading and inhuman conditions. Be specific. What are you accusing the prison authorities doing . Firstly, the manner in which i was arrested was unacceptable. In the first place i have been arrested over ten times since 2011 and all of these ten times, all i received was a police callout and i presented myself to the police. They should have done the same here. That should not be allowed to happen to anyone, including to those who treated us in that manner. The serious allegation of yours of brutal treatment in prison. What is your evidence of that . The footage is there. First this house was swamped by over 300 heavily armed policeman. They broke the entrance to the yard, they broke the house down. Then in eight days in solitary confinement i could not see anybody. I was in a room with no electricity nor water nor a toilet. Literally how can you put someone in a dark room for eight days . For what . 0n the eighth day i was taken from that location and moved to an ordinary prison. There is a court ruling. That is what it took. There is evidence. Given your treatment, would you say that you emerged from your detention fearful, or intimidated in a sense in a way that you were not before . I am not intimidated, stephen. Maybe the intention was to break me down. But i am not broken because we understood and we expected that the government like the one we have could do things like this. The writing was on the wall. But we are made stronger and i said before and i say it again. Interestingly you say you emerged stronger, but you also emerged making noises about conciliation. As i said, you saw the secretary general of the commonwealth who was instrumental in your release and after your release you said, and i quote you directly, it is our collective duty to bring unity to our country. We cannot run a country like this. We are currently so divided. So you saw the wisdom thereof collective action, presumably dialogue, to unify the country. You still feel that way today . Absolutely. And my message was in reference to specific things that need to be fixed, that need to be corrected, so that we do not continue with a negative situation. We can talk about that. We will. But i would like to go through this forensically. Is it not time for you to drop your insistence that the president is illegitimate and the election fraudulent, if you wish to unite the country . You could say that. The other way of seeing it is that the constitutional rank of disputing elections, which is via an electoral petition must be respected. So the rule of law with regard to the remedies that are viable to anybody. As i understand it, the Constitutional Court looked at your argument and threw it out. Not at all. That is the irony. The petition has still not yet been heard. I know it has been before a court. So you have had your day in court and the court chose not to take no, no. The basic constitutional provision under the bill of rights is that every citizen in a group of citizens who feel aggrieved about anything have a right to go to court and the court has an obligation to hear their matter, not to just admit the concern, but to hear it. The court took the decision to throw out your petition. The bottom line is, surely, under most circumstances the International Norm is that governments around the world take a view as to whether an election is deemed to be fair and reasonable and legitimate or not. The clear collective view in the case of zambia is that the election of 2016 was regarded as acceptable. The United States of america congratulated edgar lungu on his re election, saying it was a clear manifesto of the will of the people. The uk high commissioner sent a message this year on the queens birthday, calling on respect for the head of state. A clear signal that the uk respects the position of edgar lungu. The president of south africa accordingly invited him to south africa in a sign of his belief in the credibility of that election. You could say so and maybe you could be heard and heard loudly. If what you say was not challenged by the kenyan Institutional Court ruling over the last election. Not the Current Issues going on butjust before. It included and discredited comments from the International Community. What matters is to follow the rule of law to ensure that the petitioners are heard, not just submitted. That is important. The kenyan ruling demystified those rules. And, remember the former secretary of state, john kerry, needed an apology because similar issues where it our issue should be heard by the Constitutional Court. And then all issues would have been resolved squarely. You accuse edgar lungu and his ruling party of a series of fraudulent actions concerning the election. The truth is, your own party has a record that is highly questionable. For example, inflammatory rhetoric. This is before the election of last year when Geoffrey Wamba told a crowd of people that he would go for the throat of the president. What kind of language is that . If you followed the campaign and looked at people flowing from one side to the other,. You, for example, you said that edgar lungu wanted to kill you. Of course. Its evident. The manner in which i was arrested and detained. With respect, if he wanted to kill you he could have. But he did not. There is absolutely no evidence that his intent was to kill you. My point is this. You came out of prison saying you wanted to work for national unity. National unity means getting away from this inflammatory rhetoric. National unity means restoring the rule of law. In all respects, whether the law in question, you know, favours a particular group, it does not matter. In a case like our petition, article 104, our petition in the case, once a petition is submitted, just submitted, it then needs to be transferred to the speaker. As the leader of the united party for National Development have a duty to follow the law just as the president does. Explain to me how the discovery of 21 of your young Party Workers training in a gym with the weapons including machetes and live ammunition, how does that represent you following the law . You would like to know that the matter is in court and the ruling will be absolute. I can assure you that you may swallow your words. Accusations and trumped up charges is the order of life in zambia. We wa nt to is the order of life in zambia. We want to combat that negativity. We do not needed for our country. Did you tell your supporters to burn down the city market in lusaka . Absolutely not. That is why today there is nobody convicted on our side of burning the market. The president said it was a clear act of sabotage designed to hurt him and his government. It was framing a strong opposition, like us, to justify the invocation of article 31 in our constitution, which is the threat of emergency. Stephen, you cannot have a fire at 5 30am, and by 6 00am, you go to the scene and say it was upn members who burned the market. Where is the investigation . It was never done, which is why nobody was convicted for it. Do you feel yourself to be a true democrat . Absolutely, absolutely. Do you think zambian democracy is in grave danger today . It is in grave danger. Would you say you are partly responsible for that . I think many players are partially responsible. That is why we would like to be part of the resolution of this negativity. We are very much committed to that. As i keep saying, human rights must be respected. We have lost that at the moment. The rule of law must be respected. We have lost that at the moment. We need to stop the political violence, which is becoming the order of the day in our country. Ok, but i feel that in a sense, we are skirting around the same issue again and again. If you are serious in what you say, wanting to save zambian democracy, if you want to sit down with your opponents and find a way through this crisis, then surely the first thing you have to do is accept the legitimacy of the president. Because before you do that, how can he possibly sit down with you . You are saying any dialogue must be anchored with preconditions. Surely that is the most basic precondition of all . I have already answered the question. You havejust said it, but it doesnt make much sense. Why not . Here is a president who is accepted by the International Community as the legitimate leader of your country. If you, as the leader of the opposition, want to sit down and have a dialogue with him to work through some of the political problems that are so manifest in your country today, surely you have to accept his legitimacy . Stephen, i have already said before, there is no legal obligation in our statutes, anywhere, for what you are asking me to do. Secondly, we have a petition still in the courts of law, alive and active before the courts, so how could anybody make a comment like that . Remind me. Is it a four year or a five year term . Five years. So you are telling me that for the foreseeable future, possibly for a five year term, you are going to refuse to accept your country has a legitimate president . That is not what im saying. I am saying that if our president ial petition, which is before the courts of law, and you can verify that yourself, as anyone can, is dealt with, therein lies the issue of recognition. It is a no brainer. Why do you think you have lost five elections . 0ne, you can say that, but. Answer the question. Why do you think so . Zambia is held up by africans as an example of a state that has embraced democracy. Relative freedom it isnt perfect, we know that you have problems with the media and other elements of repression but ultimately it has been fairly free and fairly democratic for a generation. You have had the chance to run for the top office of your country and you have repeatedly lost. Why . That is what we are challenging in the courts. Every time you have run for office, you are unfairly beaten . Every vote was rigged, was it . This is the first time i have gone to the courts. Why . Because of the manner in which the election was managed, the electoral process, which lacks transparency. It lacks, if you like, integrity. That is why we are asking for a replacement of the electoral commission, to be replaced with a truly independent electoral commission, as is the case in neighbouring countries, like south africa. The issue here, stephen, is really, to turn your question around, why didnt we petition before . Why did we petition this time . It is because there were issues on the ground. And we tested our argument by petitioning parliamentary seats in an area which we thought was flawed, lusaka. Two of them, the elections have been nullified. Two parliamentary seats in lusaka. That is a fact. Let me put this to you. You are somewhat more preoccupied with self interest than the national interest. If you were serious about working with the government to try to solve some of zambias problems, you might be more focused on some of the stunning and alarming statistics in your country. Life expectancy for men, 49 years, for women, 50 years. Endemic poverty. Poverty rates which are truly stunning, and which are going to get worse because the population of 13 million or 1a million could be 50 million by 2050, and as we have heard most recently, from the former nigerian president , the population explosion in africa is perhaps the biggest problem africa faces of all of them. And yet you are obsessed with your own fight with president lungu over the last election. Cant you focus on what really matters . I really think it is not a question of this or that. It is a question of all of the things you are saying are important. Because in order to basically support the countrys population, take it out of poverty, provide education, health and clean water, all of those issues are connected to the quality of leadership. Quality of leadership in a democracy comes through in actions. And that is where the competition for office, in order to do the things you are saying, which i totally agree with, that is where it lies. It is not this or that. A recent Economist Intelligence unit article looked at your economic policies, and the governments, and concluded both of them are not addressing zambias real issues, which is the overreliance on mining the copper industry in particular and the massive amounts of money spent every year on subsidies forfuel and basic sta ples. Your economy is broken. You have, let me check, you are the third hungriest country in the world, according to the Global Hunger index. These are problems which neither your party nor the president s are capable of addressing. Now you are getting to the real issues, which affect the people daily. This is one of the issues at the top of our agenda. Governance. Governance that will ensure we reduce the endemic corruption that we see today in the country, which basically sits in many areas. Procurement of loans. Today you have a country, zambia, which is procuring expensive loans at 9. 5 in eurobonds, instead of procuring loans from multilateral organisations at 0 interest. That is the question. Why would a leadership which is riddled with poverty amongst its population go and procure loans which are more expensive than cheaper loans . It is because of corruption. And you think you can fix the problems of zambia . Zero tolerance of corruption. Will you run again in the next scheduled president ial election in 2021 . The question is, are we going to have free and fair and Credible Elections in 2021 . Is it your intention to run . We can do that if we reform the electoral process. Everybody is free to run, including myself. Finally, much of this interview has been about your relationship with president lungu. According to one technical interpretation of the constitution, he cannot run again in 2021, because he has already run twice. He says that he can run again, because he says his first election was a result of the death of the sitting president and he was only in powerfor one year before the next election came along. So he thinks he can run. Do you agree . It is not a question of whether i agree not. It is another example of the importance of respecting the rule of law. The constitution shows clearly what constitutes two terms. It is very clear. So can he run again, or not . If we follow the constitutional provisions, and that is the way it should be. So what is the answer . In yourview. Its not my view. Its a legal provision, and the matter is in the Constitutional Court at the moment, as we speak. I think that decision will be made if the judges follow the constitutional provisions, which is what we want them to do. They will make a determination as to whether he can run or not and that determination must be respected. Thats it. Hakainde hichilema, we must end it there. Thank you for being on hardtalk. Thank you. Hello once again. The end of wednesday brought the opportunity for some to gaze in awe and wonder at the moon. That was certainly the case in basingstoke in hampshire. Drift a little bit further north to aberdeenshire, and a difficulty in seeing the end of the road at times. The reason for the difference, an active weather front in the north. Clearer skies in the south. Hence some fog patches to start the day in some southern counties. And a chilly start underneath the clearer skies across northern scotland. But at last, at last, some good news for the northern part of the British Isles, especially scotland and northern ireland, which saw quite a bit of rain during the courts of wednesday. Yes, the odd mist fog patch, but some sunshine and dry weather. There the remnants of the old front strung out across wales, the midlands, and east anglia. The further south and west you are, the more likely it is youll have dense fog patches a real issue, perhaps, for the commute. But as we get on through the morning, so as the cloud comes in from the north, it will helped to lift the fog in many places, but it could be well into the morning before it really gets away from some of the west country. So bear that one in mind. The afternoon, though, marked by plenty of sunshine into the north of england, north midlands, the north of wales, too. More in the way of cloud further south. Despite the sunshine, struggling to get to double figures in parts of scotland and northern ireland. Out of thursday into friday, not too much in the way of a breeze across the south. Clear skies for some. So again, fog could be an issue first up. More cloud, i think, as you get into the midlands, wales, then up into scotland and northern ireland. But a lot of dry weather around. Just the odd bit and piece of rain coming off the irish sea. A new set of weather fronts bringing rain into scotland and perhaps the far north west of northern ireland. Cool in northern spots, nine, ten, 11 degrees. Dry in the south, but as we get into the weekend, we could see quite a bit of cool air rushing towards the British Isles on an increasingly fresh and dominant north westerly wind. But before we see that, we have to get this banner of cloud and rain away from this south eastern quarter. And heres the thing it could take a good part of the Daylight Hours on saturday before it eventually quits the scene. There that cooler fresher air moving in across northern and western parts. Keeping the temperatures in single figures. And well do something pretty similar as we get on through sunday. By this stage, it certainly will feel a good deal cooler, even in the south east. Im rico hizon in singapore. The headlines. Charged with terrorism, the uzbek suspect in the new york truck attack appears in court. Sayfullo saipov entered the us on a lottery visa. President trump calls for the programme to be scrapped. What we have right now is a joke. Its a laughing stock, and no wonder that so much of this stuff takes place. Im Babita Sharma in london. Also in the programme australias new asylum location is deemed not fit for use by the un. Doing his bit for Brexit Britain on a trip to singapore,