By Hon Job Wiwa Sikhala | The State which wanted to start my trial on inciting Public Violence charges on the 15th of April and failed, produced some drama only familiar with Hollywood. The Magistrate Stanford Mambanje gave a ruling on 21st of April that the court will give the State the last chance to provide the date for the commencement of the trial on the 29th of April, meaning today. The matter was heard today in Court 15 before the same Magistrate who in terms of the law was obliged to enforce his ruling if the state fails to provide the date for the commencement of the trial.

We arrived at the Court at 9am waiting for the State to push its case. The Prosecutor to the matter Garudzo Siyadhuma was not present and the matter was stood down to 11:15am. Siyadhuma could not pitch up and we were advised to wait for him until 12pm. 12pm clocked and Siyadhuma was nowhere to be seen. He only emerged at 12:30pm carrying a huge but seemingly heavy bag. Whatever was in that bag, its courier knows its contents as it has no sign of law in it.

After his arrival he did not apologize to all of us who were made to wait for him without explanation including my legal team of Harrison Nkomo and Jeremiah Bamu. He was arrogant and went straight to make an application for the postponement of the commencement of the trial once more again as he claimed that, there was hitches after they realized that the evidence they wanted to rely upon was an audio which has three voices speaking to it. So they needed some expert to extract the portion of what he called my voice. So they were struggling to find an expert to identify and extract the portion of where my purported voice is.

This change of goalposts surprised all of us as the same Garudzo Siyadhuma claimed that he was waiting for the forensic evidence from the police that stalled the trial from kicking off on the 15th of April. On the 15th of April it was forensic evidence that is stalling the commencement of trial, today, it was the difficulty, the experts were experiencing to extract my voice from the 3 voices on the audio.

This is the behavior that is causing the public to lose confidence in the dispensary of justice in our country. After pressed on why I was in Court on his invitation for the trial date he asked for adjournment for him to phone the IO of the case. I saw him phoning allover the place seeking the way forward.

After resuming sitting at 14:30hrs, Siyadhuma came back and said he now has a trial date and it’s 30 June 2021. On how all of a sudden the trial date has emerged, without state papers available or docket and no witness we all wondered. He said he will be ready on the 30th of June for trial to kick off. The Court granted him his wish. We will see whether the State will carry out its undertaking.