PRESS STATEMENT
6 TH DECEMBER 2020
WHY RUSH TO REGISTER INMATES AT THE EXPENSE OF MAJORITY ZAMBIANS?
We find the behavior of ECZ totally unacceptable for abandoning majority Zambian voters and rush to register inmates across the Country. ECZ needs to provide acceptable guidelines first before registration of inmates.
ECZ should have by now provided clear guidelines on how the opposition will campaign in these correctional facilities. Why the rush to register inmates before you complete registering your targeted 9 million voters? All what you have achieved is to create confusion by conducting a very chaotic voter registration in the history of this Country. Prosperity will judge you harshly. You are forcing Zambians to be very suspicious of your motive behind this rush.
Deliberately you have been frustrating Zambians not to register in huge numbers. You have employed tactics that are known in Industrial Relations as work to rule. Work to rule wherever it has been applied has produced disastrous results just like in your case. We are left with no option but to speculate that you are rushing to capture inmate votes because they will benefit PF. Voluntarily you promised Zambians that you will capture 9 million voters. From what you have done so far can you stand by your word that by 12th December you will capture 9 million voters?
You started by deploying one person to handle the whole process of issuing a voters card. Why didn’t you conduct a trial exercise to see how long it would take one person to issue a voter’s card before you rolled out the whole exercise? It seems your idea was to disfranchise as many people as possible. You hurriedly rolled out the program until people complained about the slow process which you could have eliminated had you been sincere enough. Even publicity has been a problem to you. In a normal society you could all have resigned on your own, but under PF this is very normal.
Voting is a right and therefore don’t expect Zambians to be begging you to extend the registration period. Don’t subject Zambians to unnecessary problems. PF has created too many problems for the Zambian people, enough is enough? No amount of intimidation and frustration whether deliberate or not will save PF from an embarrassing defeat.
Percy Chanda
UPND – Chairman for Mines and Freedom Fighter