THAT’S A LIE
…There’s no law or custom in Zambia on ex-presidents funerals – Prof Lumina
By Tony Nkhoma
PROFESSOR Munyonzwe Hamalengwa was absolutely wrong to claim that there is a law in Zambia that compels government to bury former heads of state at Embassy Park in Lusaka, another law professor has said.
Constitutional and international human rights lawyer Professor Cephas Lumina said there was absolutely no law in Zambia that compelled the government to bury a former head of state at Embassy Park.
“I think Professor Hamalengwa got it wrong. I don’t want to say much. I think that he got it wrong. There’s simply no law in Zambia that compels the burial of a former president at Embassy Park,” Prof Lumina said.
He was reacting to Professor Hamalengwa’s claim on Sunday that there was a law that demanded that former Zambian president Edgar Lungu should be buried at Embassy Park in Lusaka.
“Lungu will be buried in Zambia at Embassy Park. Custom and customary law in this area dictate so, independently of any agreement on his part or that of his family. There is a law respecting the burial at Embassy Park of dead Zambian presidents and it is staring at us in plain sight,” Prof Hamalengwa wrote in his weekly column published by The Mast.
But Prof Lumina said Prof Hamalengwa got it completely wrong because there was neither a statute law nor a recognised custom to support such a serious claim.
He said Prof Hamalengwa had relied on the practice of having buried five past presidents at Embassy Park, which he [Prof Hamalengwa] believed constituted a custom.
“There’s absolutely no law. I know that he argued or he placed a reliance on the practice of having buried five past presidents at Embassy Park, and in his view that constitutes a custom,” Prof Lumina said.
He said burying former presidents at Embassy Park had always been controversial and could therefore not be regarded as a custom.
A custom should consistently be practised over a long period and widely accepted without any controversy for it to be considered a law.
“Unfortunately, it doesn’t because a custom must be, for it to constitute law it must be widespread. It must be widely accepted by the community, and clearly, I mean all of these issues from the very first burial of Levy Mwanawasa have always been contested. So there’s no custom that has been established,” Prof Lumina said.
He said the burial of former presidents at Embassy Park in Lusaka had been contested because it was not law and did not carry precedence.
“Even that case that everyone talks about, the [Dr Kenneth] Kaunda case, that is not a precedent because the substantive matter was never heard. It was a procedural application for leave to commence judicial review, and what the judge said was what we call in law obita. By the way, it doesn’t create precedent at all,” Prof Lumina said.
Lungu died in Pretoria, South Africa, on June 5 but his body remains in the same country, unburied, because of a bitter dispute between his family and the Zambian government over the nature of the funeral and where he should be buried.
