Brigadier General Godfrey Miyanda—the man who apparently looked at the legal profession and decided, “I can represent myself.”

Brigadier General Godfrey Miyanda—the man who apparently looked at the legal profession and decided, “I can represent myself.”

There are politicians who studied politics, politicians who studied law, and then there is Brig Gen Godfrey Miyanda a man whose CV reads like Zambia had run out of professions and decided to give him all of them.

Having attended Kitwe Main school, Buseko, Kawama, Katete and Munali Secondary school, Brig Gen Miyanda is a career soldier who trained at Mons Officer Cadet School in Aldershot, England, followed by further military training in Hythe and Warminster.

In 1968, he attended a Staff Officers course in Canada.

He subsequently occupied enough military positions to fill a small organisational chart, Platoon Commander, Intelligence Officer, Adjutant, Battalion Second-in-Command, Battalion Commander, General Staff Officer Grade One and Colonel General Staff at Army Headquarters.

His final Army position was Chief of Logistics.

He also established the Zambia Military Academy at Kohima Barracks in Kabwe and became its first head.

His military contemporaries included General Kingsley Chinkuli, Zambia’s first Black Army Commander, General Benjamin Mibenge, the late Colonel Patrick Kafumukache and the late Lt General Christon Tembo.

But apparently military life alone was not sufficiently adventurous.

Brig Gen Miyanda also trained as a Caterpillar salesman, undertaking earth-moving science and sales courses in Nairobi and Malaga, Spain. He learnt to operate various Caterpillar machines and even qualified as a Public Service Vehicle driver.

And then came October 29, 1980.

Brig Gen Miyanda found himself caught up in allegations surrounding an attempted coup against President Kenneth Kaunda.

He fled to the then Zaire but was arrested from there and returned to Zambia, where he was detained and prosecuted for treason. He was arrested on May 22, 1981.

It was the beginning of perhaps one of the more extraordinary chapters in his already extraordinary life.

Brig Gen Miyanda challenged aspects of his detention and repatriation.

Within about two months of his detention, the Brig Gen Miyanda moved the High Court for writ of habeas corpus but his application was unsuccessful.

He then appealed to Supreme Court for redress.

However, before the appeal could be heard, the detention order was revoked following his acquittal on a charge of treason.

The case became an important Zambian authority concerning the return of a fugitive from another country and the jurisdiction of Zambian courts.

And this is where Brig Gen Miyanda’s relationship with the law becomes particularly interesting.

He was not a lawyer.

But that did not appear to stop him from walking into court and arguing his own cases.

In the courtroom, the military man who had once commanded soldiers became his own advocate. No wig. No gown. No chambers full of lawyers. Just Brigadier General Miyanda, his papers and an apparently unreasonable amount of confidence in his ability to read the law

For a man who had already been a soldier, intelligence officer, military instructor, Caterpillar salesman and taxi driver, perhaps representing himself in court was simply another career opportunity.

His legal battles did not end there.

Brig Gen Miyanda continued to appear personally in constitutional and electoral litigation. Following the disputed 2001 elections, he joined Anderson Mazoka and Lt Gen Christon Tembo and others in litigation challenging aspects of the election process.

The courts dealt with several of those applications, including questions concerning the proper jurisdiction for presidential election petitions.

Then came politics.

Brig Gen Miyanda became one of the prominent figures in the Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) after the end of the UNIP era. Under President Frederick Chiluba, he served as Minister without Portfolio and MMD National Secretary.

In 1993, he became Vice-President of Zambia.

At the 1995 MMD convention, he was elected the party’s vice-president.

Then, in one of those uniquely Zambian political developments, the Vice-President somehow became Minister of Education. The year was 1997.

He remained an important figure in the MMD until 2001, when he was expelled along with other senior party officials for opposing President Chiluba’s attempt to secure a third presidential term.

Naturally, Brig Gen Miyanda responded by doing what any politically experienced Zambian would do when expelled from a major political party:

He started his own.

Enter the Heritage Party.

At the 2001 general election, Brig Gen Miyanda contested the presidency and received about 8 percent of the vote, while the Heritage Party (HP) won four parliamentary seats.

The four MPs were subsequently appointed to government, and the party’s parliamentary presence eventually disappeared.

But Brig Gen Miyanda was not finished.

He returned to the presidential race in 2006, 2008, 2011 and again in 2015.

In the 2001 general elections, out of the eleven candidates, Brig Gen Miyanda came out fifth with a total of 140,688 national votes.

In 2006, Brig Gen Miyanda came out fourth out of five candidates with 42,918 national votes.

In the 2008 presidential by election, Brig Gen Miyanda was among the four candidates that participated in the election and he came out fourth with 13,683 votes.

In 2011, out of the 10 candidates, Brig Gen came out ninth with 4,730 National votes.

Out of the eleven candidates in 2015, Brig Gen Miyanda came out eighth with 5,757 votes.

Five presidential attempts.

At that point, Zambian politics had arguably stopped asking whether Brig Gen Miyanda would win and had started wondering whether the man simply enjoyed filling in nomination forms.

In 2019, after serving as HP for 18 years, Brig Gen Miyanda requested the Chief Registrar of Societies to officially deregister the HP. The party of deregistered on May 29, 2019, bringing an end to the organization’s 18-year run.

His political career therefore became another remarkable chapter in a life already packed with unusual turns.

And perhaps that is the most fascinating thing about Brig Gen Miyanda.

Most politicians spend their careers acquiring lawyers.

Brig Gen Miyanda spent part of his career arguing with them in court.

A soldier who fought battles in uniform, a politician who fought battles at party conventions, ballots and a litigant who was perfectly prepared to fight his own battles before the judges.

In the image, Brig Gen Miyanda as the Head of the SADC Electoral Observation Mission to Madagascar back in 2023.