Former justice minister Wynter Kabimba says ZIALE results cannot be deemed as unfair or sinister because external examiners verity them.

And Kabimba, who is now Rainbow Party General Secretary, disclosed that he also did not clear ZIALE exams at first attempt.

“I have heard that propaganda against ZIALE [that there is a deliberate attempt to keep the number of lawyers as small as possible so that we can reap maximum benefits for ourselves] and I was Minister of Justice, I delved into that problem. The problem is not with ZIALE. Let me tell you what they have done at ZIALE to address that issue. In the past, you only had your lecturer to mark your exams and then pronounce you pass or fail. Now in addressing that problem, they advertised for external examiners. So you have senior lawyers now that have been registered with ZIALE who go through your papers after the lecturers. Now if both the lecturers and external examiners say that you have failed, then certainly you have failed,” Kabimba said.

“In my first attempt [at ZIALE] I cleared eight subjects and in my second attempt I cleared the two. And I had four distinctions, in accountancy which I had failed first because I don’t like numbers. [In my] second attempt I got a distinction surprisingly, I got a distinction in civil procedure and Conveyancing. So I had four distinctions out of ten,” he said.

And Kabimba said it did not help politicians to take advantage of citizens’ gullibility as a way of clinging to power.

“I have tried for so many times to walk away from this politics of funning the emotions of our people, taking advantage of their gullibility, taking advantage of their lack of information, taking advantage of their limited education in the hope that that is how you get to power. Our people are facing several problems [such as] water and sanitation. 54 years after independence, we have people that still have no access to potable water, lack of employment opportunities, lack of school opportunities. The civil society doesn’t talk about these issues, the politicians don’t talk about these issues. What do we want to talk about? ‘How many times Edgar Lungu gets drunk in a week?’ [and] what do you guys in the press do? That becomes your main headline and yet it contributes nothing in this nation. It is not politics that I should just come here, use this opportunity and insult somebody else. It doesn’t have to be President Lungu, it doesn’t have to be colleague in the opposition and it doesn’t have to be an ordinary citizen,” Kabimba said.

Meanwhile, Kabimba said he had revised his position on who should chair the dialogue process, suggesting that both the church and ZCID co-chair it.

“Another thing that has been a problem is who should preside over this meeting? Again you have two parties that think that the national dialogue is about them, one party saying the ‘church’ another party saying ZCID as an institution. And nobody wants to give and take, nobody wants to move out of that dug ground. We have a meeting tomorrow (today) with ZCID [and] our original position was that the church must lead the dialogue. However, we have revisited that position and now we are saying would it be a problem if you had the church and ZCID co-chair this national dialogue? What would be the problem? So you are meeting the demand on the part of PF, get them out of that hole where they are dug in. You are meeting the demand of UPND and others like us that thought that the church should lead the dialogue,” said Kabimba.