The Law Demands Presidential Burials at Embassy Park
Tobbius Chilembo Hamunkoyo – LLB
The debate over the burial of former President Edgar Chagwa Lungu must be guided by law, not emotion. Zambia has a clear statute, the Presidential Burial Site Act, 2008, which empowers the state to establish and regulate the official burial site for presidents. That site is Embassy Park.
Since 2008, every late president, Dr Kenneth Kaunda,Dr Frederick Chiluba, Levy Patrick Mwanawasa SC, Rupiah Banda, and Michael Sata, has been laid there.
This is not family preference but a binding national practice rooted in law, precedent, and constitutional dignity.
In constitutional and international law, this practice carries opinio juris, the conviction that a tradition is followed because it is a legal obligation, not merely out of custom.
Zambia’s consistent state-led burials, with military honors, budgetary allocations, and public expectation, demonstrate that the nation believes it has a legal duty to bury its presidents at Embassy Park. That belief gives the practice binding legal weight.
Former presidents are public institutions, not private citizens, and their funerals are national events that safeguard unity and collective memory.
The government is therefore fully within its legal mandate to ensure President Lungu is buried at Embassy Park, in line with Zambia’s tradition, law, opinio juris, and national duty.
Yes, ECL will finally be laid to rest in Zambia as per abc , but not now!!! Nkrumah was finally laid to rest in Ghana.
Where is the mischief here; Mr Hamunkyo ??
Ask the Lungu family and their lawyer makebi Zulu why they don’t want to abide by national Given Lubinda should also explain the logical thinking of the PF and their members why they are against ECL being buried in Zambia.
ECL’d purported death ia actually an inconvenience for HH. He gains nothing from this. They were not friends but HH has to perform the duties of a disinterested Head of State and attend the funeral with other invited guests. It duty not personal friendship here.
The problem with PF leaders and their supporters is that they have short memories. Secondly, they use emotions not logic most of the time. For instance, they confuse love with duty, not knowing that is not always the case. For instance, if someone is sick, and they go to the hospital, they will be attended to by doctors and nurses to have their illness treated. These health personnel don’t do this because they love the patient but rather because it is their duty do so. Same goes with the government conducting a state funeral for the late former president ECL, it is not because of love or hate that they want to do that but because of duty, that is all, nothing more, nothing less.
The irony is why Mwamba seeks to change the narrative. Was he not one of those saying the opposite of what he is saying today?
Always at the center of causing confusion just for two minutes of fame.
Dont think Zambians forget. This wont get you off the hook
Ba Mulenga, PF is the true representation of HYPOCRISY, lies and lawlessness. They follow no order but reckon that what they want is what becomes law. It doesn’t matter if they say one thing and contradict themselves in the next breath.
They have a shocking sense of entitlement.
Someone will pay for all this confusion one day. You can not hold the state at ransom just because you have access to stolen state money which you want to cleanup.
Money has a trail, no matter how you want to chanel it.