Zambia’s roadmap to cannabis reform will not succeed in its current set-up, primarily because there is an enormous lack of political will to do what is necessary, a shortcoming that is not helped by the fact that cannabis incubation has been entrusted to people without the know-how or capacity to implement it.
This is the view of former Zambia presidential candidate and Green Party President Peter Sinkamba, Zambia’s foremost proponent of cannabis legalisation. Sinkamba (pictured here) most memorably ran on a legalisation ticket in the 2015 and 2016 presidential elections.
In an exclusive interview with Cannabiz Africa, Sinkamba said the failure to get a viable cannabis sector up and running in Zambia had nothing to do with legislative or economic considerations but was purely political.
“The party in government is not buying into the agenda,” Sinkamba said in a telephonic interview. Discussions around the eventual bills that culminated in the legislative framework to greenlight cannabis for medicinal and industrial purposes had been held from 2014 until 2019, after which a policy statement was issued.
“The party in government now was in opposition, from the president to the ministers. In 2021, the former late president Edgar Lungu ascended the bills into law and all the incoming administration had needed to do was issue commencement orders.”
But that is not how it went and almost five years after friendly legislation was enacted, Zambia has not moved fast enough to capitalise on it.
Asked whether it was judicious of Zambian authorities to designate the Zambian military, officially the Zambia Defence Force National Service (ZDFNS) as the sole entity in the country permitted with the cultivation and sale of cannabis, Sinkamba did not mince his words: “It [the plan] will be a total failure,” he stated.
For a start, the military had not been party to the discussions to the legal framework, which means they lack a grasp of the theoretical implications. Their involvement in the project was at the expense of the right people with the requisite knowledge and understanding, who have been excluded from the process.
“Cannabis is a special crop that requires special skills to grow it. There’s a lot of science that goes into it,” Sinkamba said.
The ZDFNS has been in the news in recent months for all the right reasons but one would question if it will indeed reap the fruits of its labours – along with all the right and desired results.
In April, a ZDFNS delegation toured Invegrow Ltd Facilities at Nangura Farm in Lilongwe and other cannabis sites in an attempt to replicate Malawi’s much-praised cannabis template that has seen Zambia’s smaller neighbour reap the rewards of a well-run cannabis industry, including job creation and forex earning.
In July, South Africa’s Department of Agriculture also hosted a ZDFNS delegation for an exchange of cannabis and hemp knowledge and to explore the benchmarking of regional standards.
Zambia has put in place a two-part enabling legislative framework, the Cannabis Act, 2021 and the Industrial Hemp Act, 2021, which replaced the outdated Dangerous Drugs Act.
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