NEWS DIGGERS IS OFFSIDE AND BEING PRESUMPTIVE
By Shalala Oliver Sepiso
The News Diggers newspaper, in today’s headline “PARLEY TO GET 90 MORE MPS … and more nominated members if amendment bill goes through”, is being presumptive and trying hard to cause outrage among the Zambian public using information that is not based on fact.
The tabloid should have said that the last Delimitation ‘Commission’ (read report by the Electoral Commission of Zambia) under the PF government, recommended getting more than 90 New MPs. The paper should have said that, according to their guess, since the PF wanted to introduce 90 MPs under Bill 10, they now suspected that the UPND would also go by that now. They should have said that “that is the basis for our discussions now but no one has agreed with that report yet”.
Had they done that, their opinion wouldn’t have been an issue.
New Diggers can do better.
They keep jumping the gun these days. Not sure why when they have always been the best private newspaper in Zambia.
They were caught offside on TAZAMA Open Access. A few days, they made the whole country think that Agrofuel was the only company using TAZAMA..and that Open Access of TAZAMA had kicked in and Agrofuels was blocking others from using the storage tanks, and hence the pipeline. Later, it was discovered that their story was incorrect as Open Access only kicks off in April. And Agrofuels is not even among the three companies supplying fuel in April 2025.
News Diggers are offside again here today.
The paper should wait for the draft. Dates for the roadmap have been given. Where is the rush?
The issue of building a new chamber for the parliament is also presumptive and meant to cause outrage among the public that it is wasteful expenditure. The intention of the newspaper is clear since the minister cleared all doubts on the contentious issues the opposition thought would be there in the draft bill for constitution amendments such as the removal of the running mate, the removal of the 50% + 1 vote clause, removal of presidential term limits clause and change of clause that makes the presidential term limit to be 5 years.