Kelly Kapianga (LCK Chambers) 2.7 The 1996 Amendment to the Constitution The 1991 Constitution was amended by Act No. 18 of 1996. Since, as was the case relating to the 1991 constitutional amendment, the operative statute was still the Citizenship Act, 1975 as amended in 1986 and 1990, this constitutional amendment did not significantly change the legal landscape relative to citizenship in Zambia. This Amendment largely left the citizenship chapter under the 1991 Constitution unaltered. The amended constitution, like the 1964, 1973 and 1991 iterations of the Constitution also empowered Parliament to enact legislation requiring that the time spent in Zambia under a permit be discounted when computing the requisite to year period for eligibility to apply for registration as a citizen in Zambia.96 All the while, the amendment providing the contrary introduced by the 1986 amendment to the Citizenship Act remained on the statute books. The significant change made by Act No.18 of 1996 in relation to citizenship was to amend Article 34 of the Constitution, on the qualifications to be a candidate for election as President, to require that “both his parents are Zambians by birth or descent”. The intent in creating this requirement appears to have been political. In 1994, William Steven Banda and John Lyson Chinula, members of the United National Independence Party (UNIP) were deported to Malawi two years before the elections on the grounds that they were not citizens. Subsequently, the authenticity of the Zambian citizenship of Kenneth Kaunda -- the former President of Zambia, and renewed candidate for the presidency on behalf of UNIP -- was questioned and used as a political tool to discredit him. The 1996 amendment to the Constitution requiring that a presidential candidate be born to two citizens aimed to disentitle Kenneth Kaunda from contesting the 1996 elections.97 In a similar case almost two decades later, the Patriotic Front brought an action against the then President of the opposing Movement for Multi-Party Democracy (MMD) Mr. Rupiah Banda in 2011, alleging that he was not a Zambian citizen. Later that year, another member of the MMD, Robert Chiseke, was arrested for allegedly faking his nationality.98 Some of the other notable changes related to the introduction of a provision that all non-Zambian citizens employed in the public section retire.99 Most notably, the 1996 Constitution did not completely resolve the gender discrimination in transmission of citizenship by marriage contained in the language of its predecessors. What it did do was to remove marriage to a Zambian as a ground for eligibility to apply to register as a Zambian Citizenship. Up to this point, a woman married to a Zambian was eligible to apply for citizenship while a man married to a Zambian woman remained ineligible. 96 Article 6(3) of the 1996 Amendment Sebastian Kohn, 2011, Abusing Citizenship in Zambia—Again. available at https://www.justiceinitiative.org/voices/abusing-citizenship-zambia-again accessed on 22nd October 2020. This Banda and Chinula and Kaunda cases were the subject of a rulings by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights: Amnesty International v. Zambia, Communication No. 212/98 (2000), and Legal Resources Foundation v. Zambia, Communication No. 211/98 (2001). 98 Ibid 99 Section 17 of the Constitution of Zambia (Amendment) Act, 1996 97 14 RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-CR 2020/14- © 2020 Author(s)