The quarter recorded a significant number of both legal cases and politically charged moves targeted especially at the private media and journalists. On 8th July, 2016, The Post Photo Journalist David Kashiki was arrested by Police at the UPND Secretariat as he attempted to take pictures of suspected Police brutality against UPND cadres. Another interesting case is the continued pursuit of the Post Newspaper by state agents to obviously trample on press freedom under the guise of forcing the Newspaper to pay its disputed tax liabilities it owes the Zambia Revenue Authority. After the printing press for the company was seized and shut down by the ZRA, the Post Newspaper sought other means to continue printing its publication. They contracted a local printer Mipal Printers Limited to be printing their daily publication. However, it was not long before state agents through ZRA targeted the printing company for printing The Post. As a result of the raid, Mipal Printers Limited sued the ZRA claiming K900, 000 which was lost when the latter raided and forcibly shut down its premises. In a statement of claim filed in the Lusaka High Court, the company alleged that ZRA raided its premises without a search warrant which resulted in loss of business such as printing jobs of campaign posters, T-shirts and other party campaign materials because the period of the shutdown was during the peak of the political campaigns leading up to the 11 August poll. Surely, if these are the levels of lack of regard for the law then there is a strong danger that the state will likely slide into a lack of the rule of law which is vitally important to any democratic dispensation as one of the key pillars. In a related incident, The Post Newspaper journalists Joan Chirwa and Mukosha Funga refused to take plea in the Lusaka Magistrates Court in a matter in which they are jointly charged with 4 th Revolution party president Eric Chanda with defamation of the President. The two refused to take plea on account that the ZRA has closed the newspaper. Their lawyer Nchima Nchito representing the trio submitted that it was difficult for him to advise his clients how they should plead without access to certain documents since the Post Newspaper had been closed by the ZRA. He noted that the state had continually ignored an order granted to The Post Newspaper by the Revenue Appeals Tribunal to have the newspaper’s premises opened. Mr. Nchito told the court that it was in the interest of justice to allow the accused to have access to the documents that would help them facilitate their defence as the documents related to a publication of the article in The Post which was the subject of the litigation. 15