I EXPECTED BETTER
…than the nonsense going on – Sangwa
By Kombe Chimpinde Mataka
I EXPECTED better than what we are seeing, says constitutional lawyer John Sangwa.
Sangwa, a state counsel, told The Mast in an interview that he expected a sense of urgency in developing the country as opposed to wasting time on ‘nonsense’.
“You get disappointed because we should be doing better. If you ask me, I am disappointed yes. I expected better than what we are seeing. What is even worse is when you use Edgar (Lungu) as your yardstick of performance,” Sangwa said. “That is a tragedy. I am not a spring chicken. I am an old guy. My concept of time is not your concept of time but also the country is not young. You cannot be struggling to develop 58 years after independence. When are you going to develop? There is sense of urgency so we should be dealing with constructive issues than the kind of nonsense that is going on.”
Sangwa said the barring of candidates from standing in elections was unacceptable.
He said institutions cannot use the law to legislate against those they perceive as bad.
“There will always be people that will abuse things. It doesn’t then mean a provision is bad because it is open to abuse. No. You want to bar [Bowman] Lusambo and [Joseph] Malanji, why? There is no reason. In case of Lusambo, was that he was involved in violence and everything else. They said ‘we are nullifying you but does the law say he was disqualified? No. Did the court (Constitutional Court) say ‘because your seat has been nullified, you cannot contest again?’ The court never said that and in any case nobody went to court to ask the court to disqualify Lusambo, no. The issue was election to be nullified and the court pronounced on that. So we can’t begin to put in other things which the court did not say,” Sangwa said. “…you have your own Minister of Justice who comes and puts his own juvenile interpretation of the Constitution after a judgment. Who is he? Where does he derive the power to tell us what the Constitution should be? He is a civil servant. The eligibility issue is a party issue. You cannot use a government office to pass a party agenda. You can’t and these are the same things we were condemning (former president) Lungu for and they are doing exactly the same thing if not worse.”
Sangwa said it was wrong for the Electoral Commission of Zambia to use bogus interpretation of law to bar people from exercising their democratic right.
“You cannot prevent a candidate from taking part in an election through some bogus interpretation of the law on your own without the court pronouncing. You can’t. What should have happened is Lusambo and Malanji should have been allowed to file their papers and their papers should have been accepted and then allow anybody who is not happy, who believe they shouldn’t contest to challenge and go to court. In this case ECZ took a political stand. Instead of maintaining its neutrality, it now became an agent of UPND,” he said. “And if the challenge succeeds or does not, you still have the voters – will still be able to cast their vote and tell you who they want and it happened with Lungu. We went to court…but the people said ‘we have the final say’. We sorted him out through the ballot but nobody prevented him from putting his name on the ballot.”
Sangwa said Zambians must not attack courts, judges and the Constitution because of those that wanted to abuse the law for selfish reasons.
“Even that same word lacuna, a lucuna presupposes that we know what the ideal constitution should be. It means we must judge our Constitution against another constitution. When you say there is a lucuna you are saying there is something missing. For example, how do I know there is a missing piece? Because science has proven that a normal human being has X number of teeth. A normal human being must have X number of ribs. Now the moment you have X less number of ribs it means there is something abnormal. Now tell me what is a normal constitution? Does anybody know what a normal constitution is? A constitution varies from country to country. So you can’t say the constitution has lacuna. What lacuna? There is no such thing as a lacuna in the constitution. You take it the way it was drafted and you work with it,” Sangwa said. “The only thing we can do is to reach a stage where you say guys ‘we don’t think this Constitution is working for us’ or you say ‘we want to become a one party state’. The question is this Constitution can it support one party-state? If you conclude that no it can’t, then you change it so that it now supports a one-party-state. But you can’t say it has a lacuna. If the constitution is silent on something that is what was intended. That is the way it is designed.”
He added “we have to respect the Constitution because everyone will have his or her opinion as to what the Constitution should or not do.”
“The moment you depart from that you are breeding lawlessness,” warned Sangwa.