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Suspended Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) Mutembo Nchito is deliberately misdirecting himself both at law and fact by insinuating that the Annel Silungwe led Tribunal currently probing him has been abolished by the amended Constitution, State House has said.
Special assistant to the President for press and public relations Amos Chanda has said State House would therefore ignore Mr Nchito’s letters to President Edgar Lungu demanding that the Tribunal be disbanded because the Head of State had nothing to do with the tribunal and its proceedings.
Mr Chanda said Mr Nchito should instead address his grievances to the tribunal chairperson Justice Annel Silungwe who is leading the investigative wing because President Lungu was not going to interfere with its proceedings.
Mr Nchito has written to the President asking him to dissolve the tribunal because according to him, the repeal of Article 58 of the Constitution had abolished the tribunal and its continued sitting was therefore a breach of the Constitution.
On February, 23, Mr Nchito wrote to President Lungu asking him to disband the tribunal and his letter was published in the Post Newspaper on 29th of the same month.
The suspended DPP wrote to the Head of State pleading that the tribunal should be stopped because according to him, it was illegal.
But Mr Chanda said in an interview yesterday that Mr Nchito was attempting to deliberately misguide himself and the nation by imputing that the amended Constitution had rendered the tribunal defunct.
He advised the suspended DPP to concentrate on defending himself instead of asking President Lungu to intervene by way of stopping the proceedings.
Mr Chanda said the President was not going to respond to Mr Nchito’s letters because they were not correctly addressed and should instead seek the advice of the tribunal on the matter.
“The President has nothing to do with the Tribunal and until and unless its mandate
for which it was constituted has been accomplished, it will not be dissolved.
The circumstances of dissolving a tribunal are well known and it will dissolve naturally after its mandate has been accomplished. So from the point of Constituting the Tribunal, the President has nothing to do with it and Mr Nchito should address his grievances to the Tribunal. As for us, it does not matter how many times he is going to write his letters, we shall not respond and will continue to ignore him,” he said.
Mr Chanda said the tribunal was an investigative process and could not dissolve at the whim of Mr Nchito.
He said the suspended DPP should therefore resist the temptation of dragging State House into the matter.
Apart from writing to President Lungu to ask him to dissolve the tribunal, Mr Nchito has gone to the High Court seeking judicial review over his insistence that Justices Annel Silungwe, the chairman of the tribunal, Mathew Ngulube and Ernest Sakala who are members should halt the proceedings.
Mr Nchito has in the past disparaged Justices Silungwe, Ngulube and Sakala branding the former Chief Justices as conflicted and incompetent. Recently, the Supreme Court ordered that the tribunal should go ahead and that the suspended DPP should continue to appear before it.
In his second letter to President Lungu published in the Post Newspaper, Mr Nchito claimed that the Head of State and himself (Nchito) would be held culpable of breaching the Constitution if the tribunal was not going to be disbanded.
Zambia Daily Nation
