Does the Constitutional Amendment Bill 10 provide that pensions will be paid promptly and regularly?

Claim checked:
In Bill 10, Pensioners will be paid promptly and regularly. (Claim made by the Policy Monitoring and Research Centre (PMRC)

Background
A robust and polarised debate has been going in Zambia over the constitutional amendment process that the country is currently undertaking. The debate is centred on the Constitutional Amendment Bill 10, of 2019 that was tabled in Parliament in August 2019. The Bill has been christened as simply Bill 10 in the debate. In the last year, proponents and opposers of the Bill have both directed considerable efforts towards educating and winning the support of the public to their position. One of the ways that this advocacy has been carried out is through advertising on both mainstream and social media.

The ACA Fact-checking Unit has, in this period, carried out its mandate to verify claims made to the public on the contents of the Bill. In this regard, this fact check seeks to verify one such claim. The Policy Monitoring and Research Centre (PMRC) “is a public policy research think tank established to complement the Government of the Republic of Zambia in evidence-based social economic research.” (Source PMRC website.) This fact check verifies the following claim posted on 20 June 2020, on the PMRC official Facebook page, in a poster whose aim is stated: “to demystify Bill 10: In Bill 10, Pensioners will be paid promptly and regularly.”

♻️Verification Process
In seeking to establish the veracity of the claim that Bill 10 provides that pensions will be paid promptly and regularly, the ACA Fact Checking Unit took into account that Bill 10 at the point of the PMRC Facebook post had to be read as follows:

1. The original Bill tabled in Parliament, in August 2019, that had been through the Parliamentary Committee stage and awaited second reading.
2. The proposed amendments to the original Bill whose proposition was gazetted on Friday 12 June 2020, by the Ministry of Justice.

In the verification process the Fact-checking Unit, therefore, considered the provisions of Bill 10 as tabled in Parliament as well as the proposed amendment to the Bill, as gazetted and published by the Ministry of Justice on June 12 2020. The 2016 amended Republican Constitution was also read. In particular, the Fact-checking Unit sought to establish what the substantive clause overseeing pensions in the 2016 amendment of the Republican constitution proposed, at the latest proposed amendment to Bill 10.

The substantive clause is Article 189 (1 and 2) which read as provide as follows in the 3 presentations:

Article 189 in the 2016 Constitutional Amendment (The constitution as it is today)
(1) A pension benefit shall be paid promptly and regularly
(2) Where a pension benefit is not paid on a person’s last working day, that person shall stop work but the person’s name shall be retained on the payroll, until payment of the pension benefit based on the last salary received by that person on the payroll.

Proposed Amendment to Article 189 in Bill 10 as tabled in Parliament in August 2019.
The constitution is amended by the repeal of Article and the substitution thereof of the following: A pension benefit shall be paid promptly and regularly.

Amendment to the initial Bill 10 amendment as now proposed in the gazetted changes yet to be tabled in Parliament:
The entire proposal made in the initial Bill 10 is removed. The gazetted changes, therefore, propose that the provision on pensions as contained in the 2016 amendment be retained. At the latest proposed change, therefore, no change is to be made to the constitution and pensioners would remain on the payroll until they are paid their benefits.

A reading of the series of proposed amendments to the constitution, therefore, shows that the provision remains as it was in 2016 – promoting the immediate payment of pensions but providing the caveat that if this does not happen, pensioners will remain on the payroll. The original amendment proposed by Bill that pensions be mediately paid without caveat has been removed.

🔎 FINDING
The ACA Fact Checking Unit finds that the claim that Bill 10 provides for the prompt and immediate payments of pensions is both MISLEADING AND FALSE.

ACA Fact Checking Unit: Building a questioning public.

The ACA Fact-checking Unit is part of the European Union in Zambia funded Ask-Project’ implemented in collaboration with Caritas Zambia

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