By Isaac Mwanza

“The bedrock of our democracy is the rule of law, and that means we have to have an Independent  Judiciary, Judges who can make decisions independent of the political winds blowing winds that are blowing.” ~ Caroline Kennedy, American Attorney and Diplomat

(Continued from Friday)

During the 2023 Ceremonial Opening of the Lusaka High Court Criminal Session, His Lordship the Chief Justice Dr. Mumba Malila, S.C. expressed his concerns to Judges and, by extension, to Judicial Officers about delays in the judicial process. In his own words, he said:

“The pace of disposal of many of these matters has admittedly been slow, which has
provoked the impatience of the people whose resources were allegedly stolen. They are agitated by the tardy prosecution process. They want results quickly…”

The Chief Justice is concerned with meeting timelines, rather than the requirements of court processes which may delay the work of his financial crimes court. On the other hand, the State, who is the complainant on behalf of the people, wants to see verdicts in the financial crimes’ courts delivered speedily and prays for convictions.

Fair enough, but here is the worrying aspect. Is His Lordship the Chief Justice saying to the courts that they must now act as demanded by the public who are agitated by the tardy prosecution process? The Chief Justice says the people want results quickly. So the public and the courts should never mind what the legal process requires, and the Judiciary shall do as the people demand, not as the processes require?

It has always been my believe that the Judiciary serve justice under law, and not the people as such. Do we, as a public, assume that when a criminal matter is presented before the Judiciary as “The People v. Citizen Z,” then the people must always win because the Judiciary declared itself as having been employed by the people? Do we forget that we the people are also being claimed by the political classes as being their employer?

Are we to assume, then, that there is some collusion between the Judiciary and the politicians in their joint claim of being employed by the people? In those circumstances, can Citizen Z expect justice from a Judiciary which is expected by the public to owe its loyalty not to the constitution and the law, but to a fickle public?

The old maxim that “the wheels of justice grind slowly” is being seen as an impediment to swift convictions regardless of the facts or the law and should therefore be cast out of the path to swift convictions as demanded by the people, who according to the Chief Justice, are the victims whose money has been stolen.

But justice comes about by establishing the facts as required by the law, and this is established through the judicial process with its many rules which ensure that justice is not only done, but is seen to be done.

With the clock ticking so fast, it is expected and will become inevitable that our Chief Justice Malila may come under intense pressure to show and deliver results to the executive, which represents the people whose resources were allegedly stolen. The expectations are that the Judiciary ought to assist the executive by securing convictions and commensurate sentences. His Lordship, the Chief Justice
Dr. Malila himself thus states:

“… no matter how long it takes, the courts are expected at the appropriate moment to deliver their verdicts. I expect that if these individuals are found guilty on the evidence, the courts will apply the full rigours of the law.”

But Chief Justice Malila does not end there. Speaking more like a member of the executive arm whose duty it is investigate corruption and bring suspects to book, he goes on to warn current leaders serving in government today as well as the civil servants, of what awaits them:

“I am also expectant that the criminal conduct, if any, of those currently mismanaging in any way the financial affairs of the State, stealing in various forms from the public purse or flouting procedures and causing financial loss or property – in short those engaged in criminal conduct, must know that they may be continuously undergoing surveillance and scrutiny by our law enforcement agencies and will be brought to justice as soon as prima facie evidence of criminality is established.”

As I loudly read out these remarks to my colleagues while we were taking a warm beer at Kawama, one colleague lamented, “these are hardly the words of a neutral judge who expects the State, in its prosecution of alleged offenders, to present convincing evidence on the basis of which, during trial by an unbiased court, the court will reach its verdict.”

Another one added, “this is fighting talk by an apparently neutral referee who, by his words, has already come to the conclusion that those brought before the courts, are guilty as charged unless they, the accused, can convince the court that they are innocent.”

Going by the words and tone of the Chief Justice’s speech quoted above, the author believes the courts may be disinclined to treat the accused as being innocent unless they prove themselves innocent. Whether the accused can expect a fair trial, is a moot point.

More as a reminder to the carefully identified magistrates and judges, and in a tone usually known among those who instigate and prosecute corruption cases, Chief Justice Malila told the gathering at the High Court:

“I must state from the outset that this corruption war will not be won overnight but with what the French call volonté politique (political will) and the support and participation of all persons of goodwill, who are in this case the victims of the vice in one way or another, it will be won someday.”

Volonté politique from the lips of the Chief Justice! Mon Dieu! Surely not! The Judiciary does not, should not need political will to perform its noble role of delivering justice to all – prosecution or defence or public.

This hymn of political will, should best be sung exclusively by the Executive and not the Judiciary, let alone the Chief Justice himself, one of the judges in the people’s last line of defence of our rights, the chief officer of our country’s justice system, to whom aggrieved appellants, especially accused persons, will one day stand before him.

With his own words, our esteemed Chief Justice may be revealing his prejudices ahead of his adjudication, and through his speeches to his fellow adjudicators, he foists his opinions and his prejudices upon the entire Judiciary.

[To be continued tomorrow]

“HH and the UPND have forfeited their right to be in government. They must be removed from government in the national interest, immediately, before they cause irreparable damage to our country.” Our electricity crisis: a golden opportunity for HH and his foreign friends to reap massive profits from us, as they collapse state monopoly of electricity

By Azwell Banda,

In this day and age, any government anywhere in the world that cannot guarantee stable, constant supply and access to quality electricity for all its citizens and visitors in its country, every day, all year round, is not worthy the name “government”, it must be removed from power. Electricity is the economy of any country; it is its social and cultural life. Without it, a country is dead, literally. Electricity is national security. Electricity is state sovereignty. Electricity is a human right in this day and age. Any political party in government which cannot secure and guarantee constant, steady, affordable, quality electricity for the majority of its citizens for whatever reasons is not fit to run government.

HH and the UPND have forfeited their right to be in government. They must be removed from government in the national interest, immediately, before they cause irreparable damage to our country. One working hour lost because there is no electricity for Zambia’s roughly nine million working age citizens is 9,000,000 hours of work lost to the country, forever. Of course, this number grows when visitors and other non-Zambians of working age are added. Inability to use technology because there is no electricity exponentially compounds the figures of hours of work lost.

All ordinary poor Zambians, who are the majority of Zambians, need electricity now, not just after every six hours; they need electricity all the time! These poor ordinary Zambians, need electricity even in the villages, perhaps to be able to go to the shop or garage, to charge their cell phones so that they can keep in touch with their relatives and friends. This is why they voted for HH and his UPND choir.

In a country in which formal quality jobs are only for an insignificantly tiny lucky few, millions of poor ordinary Zambians need electricity to make their daily small money for rent, water, soap, paraffin, marches, charcoal, food, schools, medicines, second hand shoes and clothing and a cold beer or two. Millions of poor ordinary Zambians need electricity so that the small business from where they get piece work can operate, otherwise they will starve, without the small amounts of money they make every day.

Millions of ordinary Zambians in all our urban areas need electricity, especially in the morning, to bath, make some food that passes for breakfast, and prepare to take children to school. They need electricity all the time. Life is actually very expensive without electricity, for everyone! Millions of Zambians survive from many small businesses that need electricity to operate. All the small shops and businesses in all our townships and villages need electricity to operate, not just for fridges, but to also stay open till late into the evenings! They need electricity all the time, not in spurts of six hours each!

All our schools, colleges and universities need electricity, especially in our rural areas! Our children are being deprived of their badly needed education using electronic devices and the internet to both access information and to process it. Paraffin and candle light is not good for their eyes and general health, nor is it actually inspiring, in this day and age. We are disadvantaging Zambian children when electricity is not available in both homes and all learning initiations.
All Zambians, in our urban and rural areas, rich and poor, young and old, male and female, need constant access to reliable affordable electricity all the time, every day, throughout the year. Electricity is a universal ingredient in all domestic and economic activities in our times. Without it, the life lived is inferior, backward and extremely harsh. Such a life is also usually over exposed to many diseases.

There is a seemingly maddening slowness, lack of urgency, casualness, dishonest, apparent chaos and thoroughly unorganised manner with which HH and his entire UPND government and choir have approached the electricity crisis in the past 16 months. They have actually been praising and defending themselves more than practically attending to the electricity crisis!
Our mass media have done an excellent job to shine their bright lights on everything HH has done since the country was informed about first, the six hours load shedding, and almost immediately after, the 12-hour load shedding, and now the staggered six hourly but still 12-hour load shedding. Being fully aware of the immense magnitude of the devastating impact the massive load shedding would have on Zambia and all the people in it, I have carefully observed and studied the response to this disastrous crisis by our government in general and our President in particular. I am not sure which one is more traumatic between the electricity crisis and the responses of our government and HH. I am traumatised by both.

We all now know HH and the UPND are compulsive pathological liars, both when they were in opposition, and now, when they are in government. This fact is not in dispute anymore even among relatively honest, sober and rational UPND members and HH supporters alike. It is the cynical, cold, calculated exploitation of the many crises HH and the UPND government manufacture that worries me the most, now. A UPND official somewhere in Zambia has already announced that young people must use this electricity crisis as an opportunity to make money! He has suggested the selling of power banks and generators by young people as possible businesses. I let this pass, hoping their leader HH would be less crude and not so savagely insensitive and opportunistic as to announce the electricity crisis as an opportunity for UPND to make money. I was wrong.

I have sifted through most of the available mass media stories on the electricity crisis very carefully. I have desperately searched for information regarding what immediate actions HH and his UPND government are taking to reduce the immense suffering of millions of poor Zambians and mitigate the full immediate impact of the electricity crisis in Zambia. I have found absolutely none. Our past is blamed for not investing enough in electricity. The PF is blamed for the electricity crisis, including as having somehow disappeared the water in order to make money! Zimbabwe appears to have drawn more water than its allocation. The Zambezi River Authority is attacked for failing to regulate water use. Electricity exports must continue because they create jobs in Zambia. Apparently there is a leakage in the Kariba Dam, and so forth.

And then it hit me! The suggestion by a UPND official to youths to make money from this electricity crisis suddenly made UPND sense to me! HH has announced in meetings on the crisis at State House that nothing, nobody, no law should stand in the way of ensuring that Independent Power Producers (IPPs) come on line, to resolve our electricity crisis. Only the Constitution, he says, will be spared, in this maddening effort to exploit for profits the extremely lucrative opportunity to make vast amounts of money which the current version of the electricity crisis presents, to money mongers! HH now is set to raise US $4 billion abroad, for electricity production, through IPPs. Nothing best explains the seemingly chaotic, extremely casual, and full dramatic media displays of this maddening apparent moronic response to the electricity crisis: HH and his friends are poised to start to access the billions in US dollars they crave to lay their hands on, using the electricity crisis!

You see, dear fellow ash mouthed impoverished Zambians, not even the IMF will stand in the way of HH as he expands our debt by “attracting massive foreign investments” into Zambia for private profits using the electricity crisis as a perfect pretence. The mines want guaranteed cheap, affordable, constant steady access to electricity, if they must plunder our resources at the rate commiserate with their supper exploitation of our cheap labour and their gluttonous appetite for massive profits! HH must deliver this electricity, and make money too.

This electricity crisis is good for HH and his friends in government because it also creates the perfect opportunity for them to remove government dominance in the electricity sector and replace government with the “private sector”. Electricity provisioning has become a bottomless gold mine for profit mongers all over the world. Governments stand in the way of the private sector’s gargantuan appetite for turning a societal need, electricity, into a permanent source of massive profits. Note the extreme contempt money monger HH displays about all our laws that may stand in the way of IPPs – they must all be removed from our statutes, to pave way for IPPs, for massive private profits, in the electricity value chains.

And so it is that while millions of Zambians of all tribes in all our provinces who voted for HH, to, among other things, resolve our perennial electricity crises, their votes are now being used to enrich foreign money and its very few Zambian parasites, in electricity, while simultaneously destroying state electricity sovereignty! This is the most cynical abuse of state power and of poor people by politicians of the HH type: use the state and their vote to impoverish them further, as they themselves become fabulously rich!

Zambia needs a Zambian government that will protect the economic and social interests and lives of the majority of Zambians including by the state guaranteeing supply and access to reliable, affordable, quality electricity for all Zambians. The private sector cannot guarantee this, ever. Electricity in this world is a public good, it is a sovereign good. It is a human need. It is a human right.

The majority of Zambians who are poor urgently need measures to immediately lessen their suffering so that they can democratically and effectively participate in shaping medium and long term state solutions to resolve our electricity crisis. HH and his friends were elected to solve our problems, not to explain away our problems and profit personally, from them. They have failed a critical test for running government. They must be removed from power, before they damage Zambia, irreparably.

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