UPND IMPEACHMENT LAUGHABLE - LAWYER
THE proposed impeachment of President Edgar Lungu by the UPND is frivolous because the grounds on which it is based are bound to fail, a senior constitutional lawyer has said.
In an interview in Lusaka yesterday, Mr Hobday Kabwe said there was no provision in the Constitution under which President Lungu should have ceded power to the Speaker of the National Assembly when the UPND petitioned the August 11, 2016 election results. “President Lungu’s stay in office during that period was perfectly constitutional. There is nothing the President did which could be considered as unconstitutional. This just amazes us. Why should something which happened almost two years ago be the subject of discussion of impeachment now?
“It is just as frivolous as the second ground. I don’t see that Bemba idiom as an encouragement to civil servants to start stealing public funds. The context in which the President put it is the way it is even in scriptures,” Mr. Kabwe said.
He said it was amazing that people who did not even know and understand Bemba were coming up as masters in interpreting the language.
“As a Bemba myself I don’t find it as an encouragement of theft. This is what happens when people want to start making political capital where there is no such capital. It cannot even be a ground on which to move an impeachment motion in Parliament,” Mr. Kabwe said.
UPND leader Hakainde Hichilema has instructed all his Members of Parliament to move an impeachment motion against President Lungu on grounds that the Head of State breached Articles 104 and 105 of the Republican Constitution when he remained in office during the UPND’s petition against his victory in the August 11, 2016 elections.
The other grounds are that President Lungu had encouraged civil servants to start stealing public funds when he recently uttered a Bemba idiom which is translated as a field worker eats in the field; and that Mr. Lungu recently said he refused to leave office even after losing the 2016 elections, and that he would do the same if he lost in 2021.