In a development so utterly grim yet so perfectly absurd that even the most seasoned of hacks might reach for the gin before breakfast, the saga of the late Zambian President Michael Sata’s mortal remains continues to drag its heels through the hallowed halls of British jurisprudence. The man is dead, you see. He has been dead for over a year. And yet the question of where his decomposing corpus shall finally lay its hat has mutated into a diplomatic dogfight of truly spectacular proportions, with a UK legal precedent on diplomatic repatriation now being brandished like a particularly arcane sabre.
Our story, gentle reader, concerns the late President Sata, who shuffled off this mortal coil in London back in October 2014. One might assume that the repatriation of a former head of state would be a formality, a solemn affair lubricated by diplomatic oils and closed with quiet ceremony. One would be wrong. For the Sata family is locked in a bitter, public, and frankly unedifying spat over the appropriate resting place for their patriarch. The widow versus the children, if you must know, has become a tableau of grief-stricken bickering that would make a vulture blush.
Enter the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice, which has now cited a 2012 High Court ruling concerning the repatriation of a Gambian citizen who expired in Notting Hill. The ruling, apparently, establishes a legal framework for resolving disputes over the repatriation of foreign dignitaries when said dignitary’s family cannot achieve the necessary unanimity needed to sign the relevant permissions forms. The Ministry, with all the bureaucratic gravitas of a wet fart in a lift, has pronounced that the remains will only be released once either the family agrees or a Zambian court issues a binding directive. Cue the sound of a diplomatic ping-pong match with a corpse as the ball.
It is, in short, a splendid mess. A glorious, ghastly, gin-soaked bureaucratic nightmare that perfectly encapsulates the modern condition: we can sequence genomes, fly to Mars, and stream cat videos from orbiting satellites, but we cannot seem to figure out how to return a dead president to his homeland without invoking an obscure precedent from a case involving a tourist who choked on a scotch egg in Shepherd’s Bush. The Zambian High Commission, for its part, has expressed ‘deep concern’ and ‘regret’, which is diplomatic-speak for ‘this is a flaming car crash and we want no part of it.’
One cannot help but sympathise with the civil servants tasked with processing this particular file. Imagine the form: ‘Reason for Delay: Familial dissent, legal ambiguity, possibly an ancient curse.’ You’d need a stiff drink, and that’s before you even get to the question of whose flag gets draped over the coffin.
As the weeks drag on, the world watches with a mixture of horror and fascination. The Sata case has become a paradigm of how not to manage the departure of a former leader. It is a cautionary tale about the perils of poor succession planning, but also proof that the British legal system, in all its arcane glory, is quite capable of gumming up the works for absolutely anyone, even a former president. So raise a glass of something flammable to Michael Sata, wherever his earthly vessel currently resides. May your journey home be swifter than your family’s ability to agree on the directions.
