CAN YOU BE IMPRISONED FOR BEING BROKE?
Picture this:
You borrow K81,000 from your rich uncle. Business goes south. The chickens die. The tomatoes refuse to grow. Even your airtime balance starts greeting you with “Insufficient funds.”
Your uncle marches to court, wins the case, and now wants you thrown into prison.
He points at you dramatically.
“My Lady, this man is pretending to be broke! Lock him up!”
Now imagine the Judge asking a simple question:
“Fine. But where is the proof that he actually has money and is deliberately refusing to pay?”
Silence.
That is exactly what the High Court recently dealt with.
The creditor believed the debtor was hiding money somewhere. Maybe under the mattress. Maybe in an uncle’s account. Maybe behind the bags of mealie meal. But belief is not evidence.
The Court said something refreshingly sensible: before anyone can be imprisoned for failing to pay a judgment debt, the creditor must prove two things:
(i) Firstly, that the debtor has, or has had, the means to pay;
(ii) Secondly, that despite having that ability, the debtor deliberately refused to do so.
Simply being broke is not a crime.
In this case, the debtor produced bank statements, explained that he had been surviving on help from family and friends, and there was no evidence of hidden wealth. Earlier attempts to seize his property had found nothing worth attaching.
So, the Court refused to let the committal proceedings go ahead.
WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR ORDINARY CITIZENS?
It means our courts will not send people to prison merely because they owe money. A debt alone is not enough. There must be evidence that the debtor could have paid but intentionally chose not to.
The moral of the story?
You cannot hide behind fake poverty if you are secretly swimming in cash. But if life has genuinely knocked you flat and you truly have no means to pay, the law does not treat poverty as a criminal offence. In Zambia, you can be punished for refusing to pay when you cannot simply for being unable to pay.
Kudos to Jonathan Sichinsambwe. Every now and then, a lawyer remembers that his first client is justice itself. Instead of chasing smoke and calling it evidence, he helped the Court separate facts from wishful thinking. That is advocacy at its finest and exactly how a true officer of the Court earns his stripes. 👏🏿
Disclaimer:
My commentary on this decision is no more a legal critique than a campfire tale is a treatise on thermodynamics. It is, rather, a dramatized retelling, a lively reenactment if you will, of the judicial clash, unburdened by the solemn drudgery of analysis and delivered with the unapologetic zest of a storyteller who knows a good duel when he sees one.
