Farewell Expendito Chipalo

THE pen has fallen, but the battle continues.

The country yesterday put to rest veteran journalist, Expendito Chishala Chipalo, who passed away on November 25, 2022 after years of battling kidney failure.

Mr Chipalo will be remembered for his spirited battle against the corporate world of pension as he served as lead litigant to get what he believed to be

a true reflection of benefits from then BP Zambia.

The court battle, lasting nearly 20 years, saw Mr Chipalo and 236 others, all former employees of

BP Zambia, take on Pension Fund Managers. They

won the battle in the Supreme Court but the victory

proved Pyrrhic. Extended court maneuvers meant

that they could not be paid. The process of seeking an independent assessor proved elusive, protracted and seemingly untenable. The long convoluted judicial procedures which pitted retirees against a

well financed corporate body proved as it needed to

do the assessment.

Unfortunately Mr Chipalo suffered the rigors of going through dialysis every week. Sometimes, he

struggled to find money to pay for the drugs needed

for the dialysis. The fact that he retired more than 20

years ago and had not received his benefits, made the battle against kidney failure all the more difficult.

He confronted the health malaise head on.

However, this illness did not slow him down and

he has gone to the grave leading the fight for the benefits for former BP Zambia employees.

A fine journalist who believed in investigative

journalism as the only way to tell a story without leaving the reader wondering or with unanswered questions.

Ba Chipalo will be remembered by the families of the former BP Zambia employees as a fearless representative, who risked his life for a cause he totally believed in.

Sadly, his life has ended before he could benefit

from his hard earned pension. If nothing, his death, should remind those in leadership to honour retirees what they are entitled to without recourse to courts.

The court systems have yet again proved that justice delayed is justice denied. Mr Chipalo has been denied justice.

To honour his memory, the surviving 239 former

BP Zambia employees must continue with the fight

and ensure that Mr Chipalo did not labour in vain.

His contemporaries will remember his bravery and attention to detail in whatever he did. He ran a column titled, Troubleshooter in the Daily Nation through which he discussed current issues, often hard hitting. He called a spade a spade.

He fiercely believed that Africans should support each other. In his last article under the Troubleshooter column, he dealt on ‘Xenophobia in Africa – who is to blame.’ This is what he said about xenophobia, “The problem lies squarely on the African Union. A bold statement must be made about African leaders to avoid actions that force their citizens to run away and cause problems in other countries.

The leaders of Africa must work hard to develop their countries that we do not have economic migrants. The African Union must come up with a policy on the causes of xenophobia before we lose more lives.”

His sense of fairness can be seen from this excerpt from his column where he clearly believed that no one should blame South Africans for wanting to

keep jobs for themselves, but rather find solutions

to stop labour migrations.

PURSUING JUSTICE AND EQUITY WITH INTERGRITY