Postcolonial Legality: Law, Power and Politics in Zambia

Foreword

I

Preliminary issues

1 Problems and paradoxes

Problems

Sources and resources

Paradoxes

Politico-legal paradoxes

Paradoxes of liberalism

Presidential paradoxes

Paradoxes of constitutionalism

2 Unthinking the postcolonial state

Imperial liberalism and postcolonial illiberalism

Constituting (post)colonial government

Misreading liberal power

The neopatrimonial stain

Exception as an art of government

A prerogativist form of power

Prerogativism and the politico-legal domain

The paradoxical demos

Constituent vs constituted power

The elusive exception

3 Constitutionalism as an ethnographic object

The Zambian context

Ethnographic encounters

A makeshift toolkit

Domains of legal knowledge

Doctrinal legality

Socio-legal alternatives

Custom vs law

The ends of law

4 Between the decision and the demos: Activist lawyers and constituent power

Perspectives on postcolonial constitutionalism

The time and place for legal expertise

Ethics and legal expertise

The prerogativist perspective

The will of the people

On 'going to the people'

Reflections

Legal activism and constitutionalism

The paradox of non-partisan politics

II

A genealogy of postcolonial power

5 Imperial constitutionalism 1924-1996

Introduction

From Northern Rhodesia to Zambia's First Republic

Independence constitution

One-party constitution

Constitutional deadlock

Reactions to the 1996 constitution

Popular constitutional politics

6 The Oasis Forum and the emergence of liberal constitutionalism

Chiluba loses his grip

Lawyers step up

The legalization of the Oasis Forum

The Mwanawasa years and beyond

The 2016 Amendment Act

Constitutional closure: The death of Bill 10

III

Law, politics and unfettered power

Excursus: Redescribing postcolonial power

Colonial emergency and postcolonial jurisprudence

The president's two bodies

The monarch's colonial regent

A profile of imperial power

Adventures of prerogativism in space/time

7 'Lawfully illegal'

Part I: A tale of two trials

The specter of presidentialism

The spoils of security

Act 1: Deposing the DPP

Politics of governance

Act 2: Trials of a president

The matrix of plunder

One crime, two verdicts

Part II: The paradoxical sovereignty of the postcolony

Innocence and guilt

The case for executive interference

The president's (not quite) two bodies revisited

8 In the shadows of prerogativism

Managing the migration of power

A slippery baton

A tale of two tribunals

Disciplining the Patriotic Front

Legalism vs political contingency

Dora Siliya's electoral blues

In the name of exception: The Kabimba Tribunal

Wynter Kabimba's stationary collision

The contours of postcolonial legality

9 The allure of postcolonial legality

Principled pragmatism revisited

A time to sow: The seeds of prerogativism

Nolle controversies

Unfettered discretion?

A time to reap

Liberal absurdities

Progress vs purpose

IV

A new hope?

10 Decolonizing the republic

A constituent presidency?

Another missed opportunity

A transformative jurisprudence?

Professor Munalula dissents

Law's purposes

The power of principles

A postliberal legality?

Postliberal trajectories

11 Coda

The limits of liberal legality

A constituent politics of refounding?

The incrementalist option

The case for a progressive postliberalism

In closing

Annexes

Source materials

Index