By Merlyn Mwanza
Economic Front (EF) leader Wynter Kabimba says the UPND has failed lamentably, saying President Hakainde Hichilema thought that running the country was like running a firm.
Featuring on the Hot Seat programme on Hot FM this morning, Kabimba said President Hichilema and the UPND were being held accountable to the promises they made, which he said they have failed to deliver.
He said for instance on decentralisation, the President and his officials were saying they were decentralising, yet the projects were being approved by the minister in Lusaka.
“What decentralisation is that? You have chaps in government who don’t understand what decentralisation is. The President doesn’t understand. The minister doesn’t understand…They are groping in the dark without knowing where the door is,” Kabimba said.
He argued that there were problems in the recruitment process because the President and his ministers wanted to micromanage things, “with the President doing the work of the permanent secretary and the ministers doing the work of the directors.”
Kabimba said despite all the confusion and lack of discipline the people saw in the PF, problems were not as systematic as they were under the UPND because they left the technocrats to do the job, saying the civil servants would mess them up if they were no careful.
“When we used to tell them you have no experience in government they thought we were joking,” he said during a radio programme monitored by Daily Revelation.
He said there were problems with the recruitment of teachers because the UPND wants to make it a partisan exercise to employ their members and supporters against the Teaching Service Commission which is trying to do a professional job.
He said the cooperatives which were being formed were not economic but political for UPND cadres whom he said had been promised money and a pay back programme.
“The UPND has failed and failed lamentably to achieve any of its campaign promises…we are simply holding them to account. They are failing to walk the talk,” Kabimba said, and that “if they were people of integrity” they would get back to Zambians and explain their failure, arguing that they owed the failure to themselves and not that they were being sabotaged by PF remnants in the civil service.
On the issue of Vedanta coming back into the Zambian mining industry after neglecting to fulfill the development agreement they signed to, Kabimba said those in the UPND kept contradicting themselves, with what he said statements ranging from saying they would not entertain back the mining company, to saying that they have stopped the court case and then also organising stage-managed demonstrations for the company to come back.
But he said from the “circumstantial evidence” based on the statements from the President and the minister, it seemed Vedanta sponsored the UPND campaigns, and the company was therefore demanding that the President and his officials fulfill their end of the bargain by getting the company back in again.
He said sooner or later, the people will see what he was talking about, saying “you can’t keep a lie for too long.”
