South Africa’s Pretoria High Court has refused to allow the family of Zambia’s late president Edgar Lungu to challenge an earlier ruling that his body must be returned home for burial.
Lungu, who governed Zambia from 2015 until 2021, died in June at age 68 while receiving treatment in a South African hospital. His relatives had pushed for him to be laid to rest there, while also seeking to prevent President Hakainde Hichilema from attending or addressing any official state ceremony.
But in August, the High Court sided with the Zambian government, declaring that the state had the authority to take custody of the former president’s remains. On Tuesday, judges reaffirmed that position and dismissed the family’s request for leave to appeal.
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“We are satisfied that no compelling reasons exist to grant leave to appeal simply because the matter is so fact specific that there is very little to no prospects that the same set of facts will confront a court again,” the court’s judgment stated, according to AP’s report.
The long-running rivalry between Lungu and Hichilema forms the backdrop of the dispute. Their feud peaked in 2017, when Hichilema was jailed under Lungu’s administration. Even after leaving office, Lungu accused his successor of weaponizing the police to intimidate him, while his relatives claimed officials once tried to block his medical trip to South Africa, allegations the government rejected.
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