PF ACTING PRESIDENT BEMOURNS MASSIVE ELECTORAL IRREGULARITIES
Hon. Given Lubinda Wrote;
Good morning my dear colleagues!
No doubt all of us are in a sense of pain and anxiety at the results of yesterday’s elections. We expected better. However this was not to be. We put in our best but this time around our best was not to be.
I wish to commend all of you for the good efforts you put in.
We witnessed electoral malpractices that we had anticipated such as:
1. Delivering of relief food to polling districts during the campaign period;
2. Rampant intimidation occasioned against our members and supporters alike;
3. Violence inflicted on our members and supporters;
4. Threats issued to voters that they will be removed form government relief programmes such as FISP and SCT in the event of PF winning elections;
5. Arresting of our preferred candidates on nomination day;
6. Preventing our candidates from filing nominations;
7. Open vote buying;
8. Use of pre-marked ballot papers;
9. Use of surrogate NGOs to intimidate our polling agents;
10. Preventing our members from voting by grabbing their voters cards;
11. Forcibly removing of our polling agents from polling stations particularly at time of vote counting; etc etc.
With such malpractices no one should credit the outcome of the elections. They were simply a sham and a blow to democracy. We can not accept them whatsoever.
Nonetheless lest we forget let me remind ourselves that UPND have been using these tactics from their early days in opposition. They have since perfected them. And now with their access to government resources and authority they are destined to make them even more virulent.
We are therefore called upon to be even more resolved and to better their acts by ensuring that we devise impactful strategies that will counter theirs. Letting these malpractices ensue will make us complacent in turning our dear country into a banana republic – a dictatorship. We owe it to future generations to sacrifice a little more than we did in these elections.
Be steadfast.