LUSAKA (Reuters) - Zambia's former mines minister, Maxwell Mwale, was jailed for corruption on Friday, in a rare case that prompted calls for a wider crackdown on graft among public officials.

Mwale, a former cabinet minister in Africa's second-largest copper producing nation, was sentenced to a year in jail with hard labour after he was found to have interfered in the granting of mining licences to China's Zhonghui International Mining Group.