KAUMBWE Constituency 2021 PF aspiring member of parliament Katongo Moses Mutale says the ruling party is full of hypocrisy because people want to appear to be committed, yet they are not.
Mutale says with Bill 10 no longer an issue now, “there will be a debate of ‘is Edgar Lungu eligible to stand in 2021?’”
He also asserts that the majority people in the PF are against the idea of President Lungu going for another term.
He also cautions that if the PF goes to the 2021 general elections: “without substitutions, we’ll get shocked.”
Kaumbwe Constituency is in Petauke district, Eastern Province.
Mutale is a long-time PF member.
He is the former Petauke district PF secretary.
Mutale served as the district secretary from 2004 to 2013.
On July 20, 2020, Mutale, in The Mast, insisted that his party needs to groom President Edgar Lungu’s successor now.
He cautioned that if Bill 10 flops in Parliament, “we should think twice.”
“If we’ll be disadvantaged that he (President Lungu) doesn’t qualify and his papers are thrown out by the ECZ (Electoral Commission of Zambia), what will be our alternative? We’ll turn into violence; stoning people. Why? We’ll be caught unawares,” he said when he called The Mast from Petauke in July this year. “Now we don’t want that. Before it’s too late, let’s groom somebody for the presidency.”
On Friday morning, Mutale called The Mast and thanked God that his words on Bill 10 finally came to pass.
“It was in The Mast newspaper on 20th July, 2020 when I said let us groom Lungu’s successor before it is too late. I’m speaking to you as an aspiring candidate on PF ticket for Kaumbwe Constituency. My words are clear; every time when we try to advise the President from afar, we appear to be people who are may be against the President,” Mutale said. “But in actual sense, we interact with a lot of people within the party. The performance, if you are watching it from afar, you may say the party is very united. This party of PF, what it has been ever since the death of Michael Sata…”
He said: “we have got about two or three groups in the Patriotic Front who want to become president.”
“They appear to be [genuine] PF members yet outside they are forming their own parallel structures because they also want to rule. So, it is a wake-up call for the President; he needs to put his house in order,” Mutale advised.
“He needs to clean up the party for its better survival. As at now, the status of PF it’s full of hypocrisy; people appear to be [committed] yet they are not. We have about four, five aspiring [presidential] candidates amongst ourselves in the party. How do we make the party grow? We are getting worried! Those are the things we were supposed to solve.”
Mutale said it had never happened that where a political party is speaking in support of one thing and then such fails.
“The failure of Bill 10, we cannot accuse those in the opposition that they are the ones who have contributed to the failure. No! If we were united and speaking one language, how could a bill which has something to do with helping citizens fail?” he noted. “My worry is the unity of the party – the party is not united. The Bill 10 thing has just shown that the party is not united and it’s a wake-up call. Otherwise we’ll get surprised when we go to a general election – we’ll get more divided. It is very difficult for us to analyse the unity of the party using by-elections.”
Mutale further noted that with Bill 10 no longer an issue now, “there will be a debate of ‘is Edgar Lungu eligible to stand in 2021?’”
“The majority people in the PF are against the idea of him going for another term. So, the President can help the party, for the interest of us party members. We need unity and sanity in the party. When we go to the [2021] elections without substitutions, we’ll get shocked. The opposition can lead the game!” said Mutale. “President Lungu shouldn’t take some of us who advise him to be people who hate him. He has never called even to ask ‘but why do you talk like this?’ ‘Why do you always come out negative?’ We are not negative but we just see something wrong in this administration.”