By Edwin Mbulo in Livingstone
DON’T succumb to the ‘tribal tag’ blackmail narrative of PF leaders because letting them go scot-free will be failing Zambians, former Socialist Party Southern province coordinator Clinton Nzala advises President Hakainde Hichilema
And Nzala, who also worked at TeleSur in Ecuador, says the UPND media team needs to be proactive because as at now they were failing the presidency.
In an interview, Nzala said the claim by PF leaders that they were being targeted on tribal lines was all blackmail.
“This is all blackmail to out race the government. My advice to the government is that they should not succumb to this blackmail by the PF leaders. If the government does not prosecute the PF leaders who plundered the Zambian resources, they would have failed the Zambian people who voted for UPND in large numbers. They did not vote because they liked the face or appearance of the President. Most of them did it because they thought that the PF government had failed them by plundering the resources, by dipping their fingers into the public purse. That is what motivated the public out there to go and vote out the PF,” he said.
“So that vote that the people gave HH is a whip to go and whip all those who stole our resources. So if the government decides to let these guys to go scot free because of the tribal tag accusation, they would have failed the people who voted for them.”
Nzala said Zambians were fed up with PF’s corruption adding that the anti-corruption crusade by the UPND had nothing to do with tribe or political persecution.
“We are just going for the people who put Zambia in a position where we find ourselves in, so it’s just fair that these guys should face the long arm of the law. If they are innocent let the courts clear them because now almost everyone in PF has a corruption tag. So if anyone is innocent, they should not get worried,” he said.
“In fact, they should welcome it so that they go to court and clear their names and walk around society with their heads high because they will not have a corruption tag. But if they don’t, the tag will stick on them for a while. So let them welcome it, the government is not sentencing them it is just taking them to court so that they can clear their names.”
Nzala said PF officials should be the last to talk about tribalism because they targeted certain tribes especially in the civil service.
He said certain people could not even get government contracts due to their surnames.
Nzala said even police recruitments were designed to leave out certain people with certain surnames.
He hoped that no other government would ever again embark on what the PF did in terms of tribalism.
He said under PF’s rule, it even became very difficult for certain people to attend funerals for fear of being segregated based on tribe.
“No one is persecuting you, it is prosecution. If you are a businessman and have 10 or 40 houses, just go to court and show them your books that this is what I earned or I earn and I built these houses, so that we can learn from them on how to venture into business,” he said.
And Nzala said he feels the UPND team was failing the President because it had allowed the PF to be noisy.
“I feel the UPND media team is failing the government, they have allowed the PF to continue controlling the narrative in the country. The UPND media team is just reactive, they are just reacting to what the PF says. They have failed to be proactive to drive what the government is doing,” said Nzala.