By Staff Reporter
The same known criminals are pushing for people’s names to lead PF, says immediate-past Chifunabuli member of parliament (PF) Ponde Mecha.
And Mecha said some people in PF have not declared their presidential intentions out of fear of the corruption drive being undertaken by the UPND administration.
Speaking with Daily Revelation, Mecha said there was a lot of confusion in PF right now, with cadres at the forefront of it, and that the same were intimidating other people from vying for the presidency.
He said all this was happening without even looking into the postmortem as there was a possibility that the same cadres and the people they were pushing were behind the August 12, 2021 election loss.
“The confusion is being spearheaded by the cadres themselves. The same person who misled the PF leadership they are the ones now trying to suggest certain names, no. We are saying no! You can’t go that route. Everybody knows that to some extent, in fact a greater extent, cadreism cost us the election victory. We all know and we are allowing the same cadres, who misled the previous leadership to start floating names,” Mecha said. “They are capitalising on the fact that a lot of people are jittery. They don’t know the route the new dawn government is taking with respect to pursuing the plunderers. They don’t know, so they are jittery and a number of them they are pushing people, those known criminals to start floating names. So where are we going as a party? Where can the party go?”
Mecha continued.
“So who is dictating that certain individuals should be floated? It’s the same cadres. What credibility do they have? And where are they getting the latitude from to start promoting certain names? What if we discover that the same cadres who are floating those names were responsible for also bringing PF down, together with the people they are floating,” Mecha said. “From various WhatsApp groups there are certain names that are coming up.”
Asked to name the people the same cadres were floating, Mecha said Kambwili was among the prominent names coming out.
Asked if Given Lubinda, Dr Chitalu Chilufya and Dr Bwalya Ng’andu were among the names also being floated, Mecha said he was not sure about Lubinda and Dr Chilufya. And initially, he said some certain individuals had mentioned Dr Ng’andu, before backtracking later to say he had heard nothing about him.
“We really need to be careful because if the confusion starts now PF will collapse in no time, and the same people who are trying to bring in confusion will celebrate. What if their motive is to kill PF? And we really need to be careful because some of these could be planted by enemies of PF,” Mecha said, adding that intra-party reconciliation should also be sought as people were pulling in different directions. “So that when we go to the convention we don’t want people to go there with pangas. We really need thirdly to educate our people, that if we really want to foster democracy in our party we should not be hearing about intimidations we are hearing …
“There is a lot of intimidation against other people standing. I don’t know where those cadres are coming from, what I know is that they are just bringing confusion. They are mercenaries of confusion and if we listen, if we pay so much attention to them we will not do the right thing.”
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