WE DON’T HATE HH, WE JUST WANT AMENDMENTS DONE CORRECTLY –
FR MAPULANGA
CARITAS Zambia Executive Director
Fr Gabriel Mapulanga says the Catholic Church doesn’t hate President Hakainde Hichilema but wants the constitutional amendments to be done correctly.
Speaking to News Diggers, Friday,
Fr Mapulanga said President Hichilema should not connect the opposition to Bill 7 to hate, adding that they wanted what was best for the country.
“It’s unfortunate that the President may think that [the opposition to Bill 7 as hate], it is something that we talked about in the presence of the President to say ‘Mr President it’s not that we hate you’. It’s only that we are looking at the constitution and we see where something is not done well. We don’t hate the President, as the Catholic Church. This is very clear and I think the President shouldn’t even connect it to that. For us we are just talking about the issue of the Constitution, we are on the other side. Like if the President is supporting this, we are on the other side where we are saying we are not supporting it and that does not amount to hate. We want what’s best for the country, [for the] constitution to be done in a correct way so that it satisfies almost all of us,” he said.
“The President when he was in the opposition, he stood against Bill 7 and even delimitation, he didn’t like it. What is in Bill 7 if you look closely at it, most of them are just the things that were in Bill 10 but today of course today now things have changed. Now Bill 7 is okay and all of those things are now okay but just a few years ago UPND was talking passionately against these things”.
Further, Fr Mapulanga said when the Technical Committee was formed, key stakeholders like ZCCB, LAZ among others were not consulted to provide a representative.
“Our position on Bill 7 is not only for this time, yesterday or today, our position has been amending the constitution when there is no time before the election, we are not comfortable with that. We said this, the Catholic Bishops mentioned it a long time ago when there was only 17 months before the elections. They wrote a passé letter where they said there is no enough time to start amending the Constitution and they even mentioned that a constitution to be amended just before the election doesn’t go very well, it brings a lot of suspicions. But the government of course have a right to go on and they went on to make a bill which was presented to Parliament even [though] we said we are not comfortable with this. Even with the way the bill was sent to Parliament. At that time the government didn’t consult very much and in fact even when Bill 7 was first presented to Parliament we were very sceptical about it,” he said.
“Some of the questions were how did we come up with the 13 issues in the bill and how did we determine what was contentious or not? Even if they are not contentious, how did we come up with this? When the Technical Committee was formed certain stakeholders like in the Oasis forum were not consulted, for example Zambia Conference of Catholic Bishops, they didn’t ask it to provide a person to be on the Technical Committee. Even the Law Association of Zambia was not consulted or asked to provide a person. In the case of us Catholics when they were looking for people to be on the Human Rights Commission, the government wrote to our Bishops to provide a person to sit on the commission and one was chosen, Fr Joe Komakoma and he is still there on the commission. But for this [TC] the ZCCB was not asked to provide a person to be on the committee. The [Catholic Father who was on the TC] was there in his own capacity. That’s how our dear brother who is on the team found himself there as a Catholic but in his own capacity”.
Fr Mapulanga said government jumped a stage of consulting the people on what items needed to be amended in the constitution.
“In our case, we are saying that the process is not followed properly because before that when the bill was deferred the government was also supposed to look at the items that are on that bill. Maybe increase the number or decrease or go to the people to ask them what items should be on this list as amendments of the constitution. What [we] found was that, that was not done but, in the judgement, according to our legal experts the judgement asked the government to do these as a way of framing. So [that] the term of reference that were produced are restricted, to only to 13 issues which means people had no chance to bring anything outside,” he said.
“This is a big contention in our case that still more people had no participation in this, so what it looks like now is that the Constitution is only coming from let’s say the government and not coming from the people. There is one step the government jumped especially on the judgement of the Constitutional court; this step is where you ask the people to have a say on the items that should be amended but this was not done”.
Asked if he felt that the Catholic Church was not consulted, Fr Mapulanga responded in the affirmative.
“We were not consulted in the sense that when they were forming a Technical Committee, they were supposed to send a word to our president of ZCCB to ask them to provide a person to sit on the team. In that way we can say that we were not consulted. The person who was there is not representing ZCCB, he is there in his own capacity,” he said.
Meanwhile, Fr Mapulanga said the Catholic Church absolutely opposed Bill 7.
“We have said no [to Bill 7] a big no actually. If you are a Catholic and decide to do other things, we have just decided to rebel and be on the side of the government. But don’t be scared in anyway that the Catholic Church is going to punish you, no. They are not going to punish you but they will know that you have turned against what your faith is saying. The Catholic Church does not stand for Bill 7, the Catholic Church wanted first of all, that Bill 7 to be removed from Parliament and then work on it. Add something and maybe remove something, ask the people to contribute to it and when they have done that go to the people, let the people now discuss and later on you can bring it to Parliament with another name,” said Fr Mapulanga.
News Diggers