‘Anti-Govt cartel infiltrates Judiciary’
THE Judiciary has been infiltrated by a cartel fighting President Edgar Lungu and the progress he has galvanised, Patriotic Front media director Sunday Chanda has said.
Mr Chanda said that inasmuch as the judiciary had performed its role with dignity and honour, a few individuals had been working against the State to embarrass and undermine the current President using fiction and underhand methods. He pointed at a named former State House official who was allegedly mishandled by a named magistrate in Choma following his attempts to convict the official despite him only being a State witness
Mr Chanda reiterated that it was strange that a State witness should now be subject of conviction order by a magistrate.
He questioned what had happened to the principle of natural justice and when a judge had ever directed who should not be prosecuted.
Mr Chanda said that something did not smell right by the way the magistrate had handled the matter and that it was an embarrassment to the Judiciary.
“This whole thing reeks! It is a politically charged personal vendetta against State House and calculated at tainting President Lungu.
It forms part of the bigger scheme sponsored by the opposition to attack and discredit the President and those close to him,” he said. Mr Chanda said that unscrupulous individuals who had infiltrated the Judiciary were flies in the ointment of justice and all that was progressive. He said that the President and the Patriotic Front government would not be distracted by a bunch of envious detractors as Government was too busy delivering development to the people being served.
And the Zambia National Students Union (ZANASU) said that the pronouncement by the Choma-based magistrate, to order the arrest of a State witness suggested that the court may already have found a prima facie case of corruption against a witness without the person having been heard.
ZANASU president, Mischeck Kakonde said that in ordering the arrest and trial of a state witness, the magistrate took upon himself the position of an accuser or alleger in a criminal matter.