MUNDUBILE IS THE BEST OPTION – BINWELL MPUNDU

 

MUNDUBILE IS THE BEST OPTION – BINWELL

MOVEMENT for Good Governance (Ichabaiche) leader Binwell Mpundu says a lot of traditional and church leaders advised him to join the Brian Mundubile-led Tonse Alliance.

And Mpundu claims Ichabaiche is the biggest political grouping in the country with almost one million members.

Speaking on Diamond TV recently, Mpundu said he joined the Mundubile-led Tonse faction because the UPND had become a common enemy for the opposition.

He added that it would be folly for his movement to think it would win the August elections single-handedly.

“This decision was made based on the fact that we need to unite to dislodge UPND, because the UPND have now become a common enemy among all of us who are on the opposite side. The UPND, we believe, are an enemy to our democracy. Look at how our democracy has basically been thrown into tatters?

They have become an enemy to the rule of law. Unfortunately, today it’s a kangaroo situation or the Animal Farm situation where some animals are more equal than the others. The economy also is in serious problems, people are hardly surviving. So, we looked at the next election in August as an election that you can’t go in just for numbers or to be on record that ‘I participated and I came third’. If we are to go into the election, we must win it. Now, it will be folly for us to think that we can win it alone, which is why we came into this painful decision to go into the election as an alliance,” he said.

Mpundu said many stakeholders advised him to team up with the Mundubile-led Tonse Alliance, adding that he won’t be re-contesting his Nkana seat.

“We have been listening to many stakeholders who have pointed us to this direction that we have now made. And here I’m speaking to church leaders, I’m speaking to traditional leaders and as we speak here I can tell you there is a huge number of traditional leaders who are pointing to that Tonse Alliance, there is a huge number of Church factions that are pointing to that direction, they are the ones who convinced us that this is the direction to go. So, let me say without sounding unreasonable that it looks like Honourable Brian Mundubile may actually be leading the pack around the opposition and that’s what led us into that particular alliance,” he said.

“I am now part of the bigger picture or a bigger plan, I am not going into Nkana, I have done my part. I wish that the people of Nkana can now pick a better person than me. I have done my home work, I did what I promised I would do, I think now there is a calling that I must step up and help at a bigger platform. So I will be helping galvanise support for Tonse Alliance across the
, so I will be a freelancer”.

Meanwhile, Mpundu said his Ichabaiche movement was arguably the biggest political grouping in the country.

“I have been telling people that if we were to put numbers, we could arguably be the biggest political grouping at the moment because when you go into our database, those who have now managed to register with membership cards have actually exceeded 600,000. But those who have not yet, because others have struggled, in total we could be clocking about a million members, so when you look at the context of the sizes of political parties we could arguably be the biggest, save for the UPND, they would claim they are bigger because they got 2.8 million votes in the last election. But between me and you, you know that those who vote are not necessarily your members, because voting is based on the mood of that particular time,” said Mpundu.

“We’ve had serious engagement with different stakeholders. Civil society organisations, the church and traditional leaders have all called on us not to go in alone, because then we would distribute these votes among opposition members or share as they like to call it. So we came to a painful decision that we had to let go of our ambitions, me for example who wanted to be president, I had to let go of my ambitions to become president, or at least shelve that ambition to now be part of a bigger group”.

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