President Edgar Lungu has blocked the UPND President Hakainde Hichilema from landing at Ndola airport today.
The UPND leader had gotten flight rights to fly to the Copperbelt for the burial of the Copperbelt UPND Youth Chairperson Ronald Manenga who died in a road traffic accident over the weekend.
On being informed of the UPND President’s trip and programme to the Copperbelt, Mr. Lungu quickly cooked up some programme to also travel there for what he called ‘touring developmental’ programmes.
According to the harshly planned programme, President Lungu should have been at Lusaka airport by 07:00 hours so he can land in Ndola by about 08 hours.
Sources close to the security wings revealed that on hearing Mr. Lungu’s programme, the UPND leader Mr. Hichilema was magnanimous enough to delay his departure time from Lusaka airport from the booked 06 hours, to 09 hours so as to allow President Lungu to go ahead.
The UPND leaders on the Copperbelt had to request the family of the deceased to delay the funeral service of late UPND member by a few hours to accommodate the changed programme for Mr. Hichilema.
Sources say the UPND leader later applied to have his flight re-routed to Kalulushi and avoid Ndola airport for today to accommodate Mr. Lungu.
But now security sources say there would be no landing rights for Mr. Hichilema’s at any of the airports on the Copperbelt as long as Mr. Lungu is there.
Sources wondered why Mr. Lungu was even blocking his friend because the bulk of his (Mr. Lungu) programme is in Chingola where a few miners have been paraded to offer solidarity to him over the KCM confusion.
Mr. Lungu has cheated the KCM miners to accept part payments for their packages after the mine has been striped into two parts.
But the truth is that the miners will get the first payments now for election purposes, but they will not get any other payment after that just like those who were cheated with land after massive job losses ahead of the 2016 elections.