An all-female Court of Appeal panel delivers a landmark ruling on the abuse of ex parte orders and corporate insolvency law — with clarity, courage and an unmistakable message.
Lusaka, 1 April 2026
In Zambia’s legal history, there are rulings that settle a dispute between parties — and then there are rulings that speak to an entire system. The judgment handed down on 1st April 2026 by the Court of Appeal in Application No. 007/2026 belongs firmly in the second category. What makes it all the more remarkable is who delivered it: three of Zambia’s most distinguished female jurists, sitting together as a full panel, speaking with one authoritative voice.
Lady Justices A. M. Banda-Bobo, A. N. Patel S.C., and Y. Chembe did not merely resolve an application before them. They drew a clear and unambiguous line in the sand against the growing abuse of ex parte court orders and the weaponisation of Zambia’s corporate insolvency framework — conduct the Court described, without equivocation, as an abuse of judicial process that could no longer be countenanced.
THE PANEL THAT RESTORED ORDER
The ruling was delivered in a matter that had descended, in the Court’s own words, into something resembling a “James Bond” production — theatrical, fast-moving and full of procedural stunts. Applications had been filed carelessly, case numbers used interchangeably, illegible documents placed before the court, and what appeared to be confidential client communications inadvertently included in court records. Chaos, in short, had taken hold of the proceedings.
Into that chaos stepped the three-judge panel. What followed was a ruling of exceptional precision: methodical in its review of the facts, firm in its legal analysis, and bracingly direct in its conclusions. The disorder that had characterised the litigation below was met with exactly the kind of calm, structured authority that the moment demanded.
“Should the Court sit by as a mere bystander, watch the proceedings unravel and bemoan its inability to take conduct on account of procedural reasons?” — The Court’s own rhetorical question, answered decisively: No.
The panel asserted jurisdiction where a single judge had declined to do so, set aside that earlier ruling, and confirmed a stay of the appointment of a provisional liquidator — all while issuing pointed guidance to the lower court, to the legal profession, and to the Registry itself. Every loose thread was addressed. Every abuse was named. The Court did not look away.
THE JUDGES
The ruling was authored by Lady Justice A. N. Patel S.C., who delivered the judgment of the Court — but it spoke for all three, and the collective weight of the panel was unmistakable throughout.
Lady Justice A. M. Banda-Bobo — Court of Appeal Judge
Lady Justice A. N. Patel S.C. — Court of Appeal Judge (Author of the Ruling)
Lady Justice Y. Chembe — Court of Appeal Judge
Together they represent a formidable depth of judicial experience. Their collective presence on a single panel is itself a statement — not one that needed to be made explicitly, because the quality of the judgment made it for them. This was not a ruling that hedged or deferred. It was a ruling that led.
WHAT THEY FOUND — AND WHAT THEY DID ABOUT IT
The underlying dispute arose from a shareholder conflict over two companies — Ng’andu Consulting Limited and ALD Plant and Fleet Management Limited. A winding-up petition had been filed at the Ndola High Court, and within twenty-four hours, an ex parte order was granted appointing a provisional liquidator with, in the Court’s words, “wide unbridled powers” — and without the mandatory return date required by Rule 8(3) of the Companies Winding-Up Rules 2004.
What followed was a rapid and aggressive exercise of those powers: bank accounts targeted, correspondence copied to the presiding judge’s Marshal in a procedure the Court described as “alien,” contempt proceedings launched within days, and the companies referred to as being “In Liquidation” before any winding-up order had been made or any petition heard. Meanwhile, the affected parties’ urgent application to challenge all of this sat unheard, repeatedly displaced by the opposing side’s own tactical applications.
The panel looked at this record and called it plainly: the lower court’s treatment of the parties had been “oppressive.” The conduct of the provisional liquidator had been “bizarre” and “trigger-happy.” The ex parte order itself was defective, issued in violation of a mandatory statutory requirement. And the Applicants’ concern about not receiving fair treatment was, the Court held, entirely “justified in the circumstances.”
“The threat to company property is imminent, the fear of assets being depleted or dissipated is glaring — all this empowered by the Court through a defective ex parte Order.”
The Court did not stop at finding fault. It acted. The stay of the provisional liquidator’s appointment was confirmed. The matter was ordered to be re-allocated to a different judge. And the Court served clear notice that future conduct of this kind — including careless filing by lawyers — could attract personal costs orders against Counsel.
A BROADER MESSAGE: BRINGING ORDER TO A CHAOTIC LANDSCAPE
The ruling goes well beyond the parties before the Court. It speaks directly to what the panel identified as a “growing practice” of ex parte litigation that has “mushroomed” in Zambia’s courts — a culture in which the ex parte application has become a first resort rather than a last one, used not in genuine emergencies but as a tactical weapon to obtain orders against parties who have been given no opportunity to be heard.
The Court’s condemnation of this culture was unsparing. Citing its earlier decision in ZESCO Limited v Ntalasha Mutale, the panel reiterated that an ex parte application must demonstrate genuine emergency and the risk of irreparable harm. It is not, the Court made clear, a mechanism for ambush.
The ruling also drew explicitly on the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment in Fred M’membe and Post Newspapers Limited (In Liquidation) v Mboozi and Others (Appeal No. 07/2021, 17th February 2022) — authored by Chief Justice Malila, sitting with Wood and Chinyama JJS — which condemned conduct that manipulates the liquidation framework to achieve ulterior purposes, declared an entire liquidation void, and ordered the liquidator, Mr Lewis Mosho, himself to appear before the High Court to face consideration of his personal liability. There is a particular significance in the fact that principles first articulated by the country’s own Chief Justice in 2022 must now be reinforced and extended by the Court of Appeal in 2026 — because the conduct they condemned was allowed to continue unchecked in the intervening years. That the task of holding that line has fallen, in 2026, to three women on the Court of Appeal is not a footnote to this story. It is, in many ways, its defining detail.
Beyond the courtroom, the Sun Pharmaceuticals Limited Zambia litigation provides the starkest illustration of what happens when these abuses are allowed to proliferate unchecked. Court papers in that matter reveal that the Kalenga family — having lost their claims against the company’s recorded shareholders, the Sadhu family, before Zambia’s Superior Courts — mounted a sustained, multi-jurisdictional campaign through proxies across the Ndola, Livingstone and Lusaka High Courts, obtaining ex parte orders appointing provisional liquidators, business rescue administrators and scheme managers over a solvent company, without ever serving the company with process. Each front, when subjected to judicial scrutiny, was closed. The pattern, and the conduct it represents, is precisely what the Court of Appeal has now formally and forcefully condemned.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE BENCH
It would be easy — and wrong — to treat the composition of this panel as incidental. In a legal culture where the loudest, most aggressive litigation has too often been rewarded with procedural victories through sheer persistence and tactical filing, the response from this bench was notable for its qualities: measured, thorough, unintimidated and clear.
The ruling does not announce itself as a feminist act. It does not need to. What it demonstrates, simply by existing and by being what it is, is that the qualities most needed to address systemic abuse of judicial process — precision, courage, independence and an unwillingness to be manipulated by procedural theatre — were present in abundance on this bench.
Lady Justices Banda-Bobo, Patel and Chembe brought to a deeply disordered situation exactly what it required: not more noise, but clarity. Not more delay, but decision. Not the path of least resistance, but the path that the law — and the parties before them — required them to take.
In a matter defined by chaos, carelessness and the abuse of process, three women brought order. The ruling they delivered is not just good law. It is, in the truest sense, good judgment.
WHAT COMES NEXT
The ruling is not the end of the road. The winding-up petition in Ndola must still be heard and determined. The broader pattern of abuse documented in the Sun Pharmaceuticals litigation awaits further judicial and regulatory attention. And the systemic vulnerabilities that the Court of Appeal has identified — in the ease of obtaining ex parte orders without return dates, in the absence of gatekeeping mechanisms against tactical insolvency petitions, in the inadequate oversight of provisional liquidators — require a legislative and institutional response that no single ruling can provide.
But what this ruling has provided is something equally important: a clear, authoritative statement of where the law stands, delivered by a court that was not prepared to be a bystander. The Law Association of Zambia, Parliament and the judiciary’s leadership would do well to build on it.
For now, Zambia’s courts — and those who appear in them — have been put firmly on notice. Three judges made sure of that.
Based on the ruling of the Court of Appeal for Zambia in Application No. 007/2026 (CAZ/08/616/2025), Ng’andu Consulting Limited & Others v David Mwale, decided 1 April 2026; and publicly available court filings and rulings in the Sun Pharmaceuticals Limited Zambia litigation, including cause numbers 2024/HN/93; 2024/HL/29; 2024/HP/1249; and 2024/HPC/0911.
