Focus on Supreme Court hearing on election results

There was good and bad news for Zambian opposition parties this week when they asked the Supreme Court to nullify last December's election, which President Levy Mwanawasa officially won by the narrowest of margins. The good news was that the Supreme Court was willing to listen to them. The bad news was that with no time limit, any decision by the judges was likely to take a very long time in coming. That has prompted sections of civil society to ask the government to look beyond the consolidated petition presented by opposition parties to the Supreme Court on Monday. Some NGOs have argued that at the heart of the dispute are what they consider the country's flawed electoral laws, and have called for constitutional reforms. "The electoral laws clearly have lots of flaws. If the laws were tight and clear-cut, you would not see presidential or parliamentary petitions after every other election because most of the complaints would have been ironed out at an early stage. We recommend electoral law reform," said Alfred Chanda, a law lecturer at the University of Zambia, and chairman of the election monitoring group, the Foundation for a Democratic Process (FODEP). But there has also been concern that approach could brush under the carpet the current issue of the controversial December election. Rather than looking to the future, any proven irregularity must be dealt with now, to send a clear message that electoral fraud cannot be tolerated, some rights groups have insisted. "If substantial irregularities are presented as evidence before the Supreme Court, President Mwanawasa's election should be declared illegal and a recount or fresh elections should be conducted. After all, there was only a difference of 34,000 votes between him and his runner-up after trailing for five days," Ngande Mwanajiti, chairperson of Coalition 2001, a consortium of five NGO's that monitored last year's election told IRIN. "Did the Electoral Commission of Zambia do a good job in ensuring that the election was flawless? The answer to me is no, and if you ask me whether Mwanawasa was popularly elected, my answer would be a categorical no again. There is evidence to support that position," he said. At the start of the hearing, the president's lawyers argued they either had not been furnished with opposition evidence on time, or had not received instructions from their client on certain issues. The high point for the opposition, however, was when the leader of the European Union (EU) team that monitored the election, Michael Meadowcroft, repeated the EU's earlier findings that the election result did not reflect the view of the majority of Zambians. Meadowcroft told an attentive full bench, comprising seven Supreme Court judges, that the government, under former president Frederick Chiluba, often denied the opposition access to the state media which instead overtly championed the ruling Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) candidate, Mwanawasa. Repeating the conclusions of the EU's post-election report, he added that District Administrators had openly campaigned for Mwanawasa using state resources. The Electoral Commission also allegedly concentrated voter registration in areas believed to be MMD strongholds, thereby disenfranchising voters believed to be sympathetic to the opposition. Other international observers to the December poll, such as the Carter Centre, made similar observations. So did domestic poll watchers, Coalition 2001 and FODEP. Mwanawasa, who on several occasions had publically said he would step down if overwhelming evidence showed he was fraudulently elected, has seemingly begun to take a harder line. He recently announced he would remain in office for his full five-year term, disregarding the fact that the Supreme Court should have the final say after examining the evidence against him. "I look at the statements as mere bravado," Chanda told IRIN. "As a politician, he needs to give hope to his supporters that everything is fine and that's what he was doing, I think it should be seen in that way." Mwanajiti, however, was less forgiving. "Those statements should not be taken lightly. He [Mwanawasa] ought to be cited for contempt, so that he can explain how he knows that he will stay in office for a full five year term even when the Supreme Court is the one that makes a final decision," he said. The Supreme Court is due to resume its hearings on Friday.