At their summit in Nassau, The Bahamas, in 1985, the Commonwealth Heads of State and Governments, CHOGM, decided to establish an Eminent Persons Group to explore difficult dialogue with the Apartheid regime in South Africa. The EPG was to be led jointly by Australia’s former Prime Minister, Malcolm Fraser, and Nigeria’s former military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo.
In response to Chief Anyaoku’s insistence that Trevor be promptly released, Mr. van Heerden volunteered that he would be granted bail overnight to appear “before Magistrate Court No. 13 the following morning”. According to Chief Anyaoku: “Mr. van Heerden then went on to tell me that, once the case was called, it would immediately be adjourned sine die…. I thereafter told him that I would make discreet use of the information he had given me.
The year after President Chiluba’s ascent to power, the office of Chief Justice became vacant after the country’s first indigenous Chief Justice, Annel Musenga Silungwe, quit the office at the age of 57. To succeed him, Chiluba appointed Matthew Ngulube. At the time, Zambia’s judges were poorly paid, a legacy from the era of Kaunda’s one-party state.
Zambia was not the only place where judges preached independence but failed to practise it. In Malawi, government engineered judges with generous awards of sugar distribution quotas. In April 2020, Mali’s Constitutional Court overturned the results of more than two dozen parliamentary seats won by the opposition. Its decision to hand these seats over to the ruling party sparked an uprising that led to the government’s overthrow. When the court was busy robbing the opposition of its seats, the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, and the African Union, AU, looked complicitly on.