By Oliver Chisenga
BRIAN Mundubile says there is a long list of PF officials who are supposed to be arrested.
Speaking on ‘Burning issues’ programme on 5FM radio on Tuesday, the PF chairperson for legal affairs said going by what had been heard that the party’s Kabwata Constituency candidate Clement Tembo could be arrested for alleged crimes committed in connection with the presidential empowerment funds, it would be difficult to find another person who was not on that list.
“First of all we have no intentions to change our candidate. That I must make very clear and by the way there is a long list of PF officials who are supposed to be arrested. So it will be very difficult to find one who is not on that list. The list is quite long, it’s a couple of pages by the way,” Mundubile said.
He also dismissed the ruling UPND’s chances in the upcoming by-election.
“UPND are going into Kabwata, as a party, very weak and are also going in with a weak candidate. So it was going to make a difference if they had changed the candidate,” Mundubile said.
He said Tembo was not only a strong candidate but was also poised to win.
He said the PF would stick with Tembo regardless of the rumours of his impending arrest“Victory is guaranteed. It’s a risk we are going to take and we leave it up to the courts to confirm whether or not the charges that he will be slapped with will stand in the courts of law,” he said.
And Mundubile confirmed that he had heard rumours that he too was earmarked for arrest though he does not know why.
“I have heard that before. Why they may want to do that, I do not know. The issue mentioned in the Faith Musonda case is every remote and I think we offered an explanation to that. You see we do business with various people. I may do business with you today and 10 years later you get into trouble. It doesn’t mean I should also get into trouble. We offered an explanation on how we were directors in a company with Faith. We had a business venture that never took off. Basically the business never traded, not a single time. You check into the bank accounts, check through the banks, check everywhere. It was a business idea that we conceived before it couldn’t take off. The subject matter, the fundamental issue was acquiring land then sub-dividing it with an intention to sell it later but we discovered that particular land has reduced in size as opposed to what was being promised,” he explained.
“And we also observed that the particular traditional leadership we were dealing with may not have been giving us the factual situation on the ground. We immediately abandoned the idea and that was the end.”
Asked if he were friends with Musonda, Mundubile said, “Yes, I know her. I know Faith.”
Meanwhile, responding to President Hakainde Hichilema’s recent comments on contractors who received advance payments on government contracts which later accumulated as penalties, Mundubile said the trend was standard.
He said contracts of such nature were self-financing because of their size.
“…You demonstrate capacity by responding to a bid. You put in a bid and show capacity. You can either have equipment or indeed hire equipment. Even capacity to hire is considered because you disclose in your document. In your bid document you disclose that ‘this one I don’t have, I’ll hire’. I will give you an example. You are an engineer
who worked for RDA [Road Development Agency] for 20 years after graduating from UNZA [University of Zambia] and supervising all major projects and you decide to go and start up your own business…one you have capacity to make a road. What you may not have, because you are not corrupt and did not steal any money and have left government without any grader but you have the knowledge and because you have friends, they have assured you that get a contract; we will hire you a grader, a bulldozer and so on. So you go with that capacity,” he said.
“You use your house in Chalala and take it to an insurance company or bank to give you a bond, performance bond or an advance guarantee bond.”
Mundubile said an advance payment was part of the contract.
“The much talked about advance payment is actually secured. This is standard in the region. Go anywhere, they give you advance payment. Now, that advance payment is not given for free. They give you to create working capital for you so that you can begin to execute. Say your contract is K50 million – by the way advance payment is not 20
per cent as I have heard, it’s only 10 per cent. It was reduced to 10 per cent a long time ago – this 10 per cent amounts to K5 million,” he explained.
“So what the clients ask you to do is to bring a bond from a bank or insurance company equivalent to K5 million and then they give that K5 million to you to go and start your work. So as you are working and generating interim payment certificates, they are deducting, they are slowly recovering that K5 million progressively. They will recover until the end.”
Mundubile further said a number of Zambian companies had built capacity in terms of equipment.
He said his company had also built capacity, stating that it was a proudly Zambian owned and could compete with any Chinese company.
Asked if he had declared interest when he was in government, Mundubile said he has always done that.
“And we just built ourselves, we built ourselves from zero…We have engineers, equipment,” said Mundubile. S