CELESTINE MUKANDILA GETS CONSTITUTIONAL BAIL By Deeleslie MondokaPicture this: A man is arrested and charged with offences that are bailable. His lawyers say, “Gentlemen, either take this man to court or let him go.” The State says, “Not so fast. We have some technicalities.” Days pass. Then weeks. The man is moved from one State […]

CELESTINE MUKANDILA GETS CONSTITUTIONAL BAIL

By Deeleslie Mondoka
Picture this:

A man is arrested and charged with offences that are bailable. His lawyers say, “Gentlemen, either take this man to court or let him go.”

The State says, “Not so fast. We have some technicalities.”

Days pass. Then weeks. The man is moved from one State institution to another. Eventually, Immigration announces, “We have permanently released him.”

Excellent news, right?

Not quite.

Immigration promptly hands him to the Police.

So the man is apparently “released” from Immigration, while still very much a prisoner of the State. This is where Justice Mulenga essentially said, Ba Government, let us not play musical chairs with somebody’s liberty.

You cannot move a person from Immigration to Police, Police to Prison, and Prison to somewhere else and pretend that every change of uniform resets the constitutional clock.

The Court’s point was beautifully simple: you cannot defeat the Constitution by changing the person holding the keys.

And here is where constitutional bail comes in. Constitutional bail is a special court-ordered release granted when an arrested person is not brought to trial within a reasonable time. In essence, the court is saying: “You may investigate this person, and prosecute him if you have a proper case, but you cannot keep him locked up indefinitely when the Constitution requires his liberty to be protected.”

Bail therefore does not mean the man has been declared innocent. It means the State has failed to justify continuing to keep him behind bars.

Now, there is a wider lesson here, especially for public office.

Imagine a public institution becoming somebody’s little tribal village, where rules depend on who you know, which camp you belong to, or which chair you are sitting in. That is precisely the danger the rule of law is designed to prevent. Government offices are not private kraals where officials can make up the rules as they go along.

For the general citizen, this decision means something very important: the Constitution protects your liberty even when the machinery of government becomes slow, confused or convenient to itself.

Moral of the story:

The State may change uniforms, offices and vehicles, but it cannot change the Constitution. And when government starts treating the law like chibwantu at a political rally, the courts must remind everybody that the Constitution, unlike tribal loyalty, belongs to all of us.