NTHAWI yanu yasila a Lungu, step aside, you have done your work, so leave the fight to the next generation, Kelvin Bwalya Fube has advised President Edgar Lungu.
And Fube says it does not make sense for President Lungu to ask PF members to mobilise the party but appoint opposition MMD after they destroy the former ruling party.
Speaking Radio Christian Voice’s Chat Back programme on Friday, Fube, commonly known by his initials KBF, said the nation had walked with ‘ba Lungu’ and seen his leadership; “the kind that can’t take Zambia to an economic prosperity level”.
Fube said he could not imagine the next five years economically with the current leadership.
“If a leader is not giving you economic prosperity, why are you dancing around for him? If a leader today is not giving you economic progress, why are you going to dance at the airport for him? He is eating but you are not eating, you leave the airport with a ka K20 in your pocket, then what? We have had six, seven eight years of ba Lungu, mu Chibemba tutila ukususha ilungu kwendamo, we have walked with ba Lungu,” Fube said.
Fube said his prayer was that the country does not put judges and the Zambian Constitution to the test over the issue of President Lungu’s eligibility.
“Let’s look at countries where these things have happened; just our next door neighbours here in Malawi, we saw what happened. We are also following on social media what is happening in Uganda, where the constitution is being violated and raped. We have basically created a tyrant in Uganda. There is a problem in Africa. Many times people don’t want to speak against a President who is incumbent, because everybody is thinking they must bootlick him, must massage him, no, a wrong is a wrong,” he said.
He said his prayer was that the judges would be strong enough to say what the constitution says and not just follow the whims and fancies of the politician.
Fube, a renowned lawyer, said he does not want to see the judges and the constitution put on trial and that was why he had consistently said he does not want anyone to say or claim that he was “challenging Edgar Lungu”.
And Fube said the entire Zambian governance system required an injection of new energy.
He said one of the ways of restoring confidence was by going back to the basics by beginning to respect the rule of law and good governance across the board.
He said good governance and the rule of law must be the beginning point in instilling public confidence back into the system.
“Anybody who is found wanting must be prosecuted, there should be no sacred cows when it comes to a breach, after all the people who run the procurement systems are professionals. From a political angle, we must make sure that people appointed to positions of authority to go and run ministries must be qualified and capable of running those ministries,” he said.
Fube said the idea of appeasing cadres should be done away with, as they are not necessary in running technical issues.
He said when a country had the right people in the right places, they would be reading documents and not just signing them blindly.
Meanwhile, Fube said one of the major components, which had resulted in lack of confidence in the PF was that there were too many appointments.
He noted that too many people have been given appointments on a silver platter when they do not deserve them.
“That has brought frictions among people that have actually worked for the party who are more deserving and sometimes even more capable…but you go and bring riff-raffs, you appoint them because they are bootlickers to you! You appoint people who are incapable because they are loyal to you…no, no, no,” he disagreed.
Fube said in politics just like in government, loyalty must not just be on the basis that one was going to bootlick and sing praise to leaders.
“Loyalty has a price, the price is responsibility but if you give someone an appointment, he will be loyal to you but not responsible, and it will come back to you…the buck stops at you, the appointing authority. So if you make that mistake, don’t cry tomorrow to say mwandetelela, it’s your call.”
He insisted that the favour, nepotism, tribalism and the wako ni wako business stink.
He said meritorious kind of government was the best.
Fube noted that in politics there was too much favoritism and so many appointments have been made and the wrong people were now in office.
He regretted that most times the people appointed through favoritism had hailed from other parties.
“Now the members that you find in PF, are they so bad that you can’t give them those positions? If not, why are you neglecting them…that again is giving ammunition to divisions within the party because people are saying why are we working for this party,” he said.
Fube said majority of PF members were still in opposition, stating that those that had “come to eat the carcass in the ruling party” after killing the MMD were the same ones from the former ruling party.
“What’s the point?” he asked. “What’s the point? why do you want people to be working, to go and mobilise the party when you are going to be appointing the wrong people?…it doesn’t make sense to me, it doesn’t.”
President Lungu last week appointed former MMD member Raphael Nakacinda as water development, sanitation and environmental protection minister.