PF tells off unpatriotic Oasis Forum

CLAIMS by Oasis Forum on the eve of our independence that Zambia is an autocracy are not only malicious but offensive and extremely unpatriotic, PF deputy media director Antonio Mwanza said. In an interview yesterday, Mr. Mwanza said such a wild and misguided statement was not only false but an insult to the collective intelligence of the Zambian people who lined up en masse to exercise their democratic right to vote the PF into power. “Naturally, we wouldn’t waste our valuable time to respond to a defunct and moribund entity like the Oasis Forum but we are not naive to deduce a simple fact that the narrative being peddled by these self-serving, self-sanctimonious individuals is part of large scheme by unpatriotic charlatans masquerading as activists and civil society leaders pushing an opposition agenda for regime change, “President Edgar Lungu and the PF Government were popularly and democratically elected by the people of Zambia and to claim that President Lungu is an autocrat is to insult the collective intelligence of the majority Zambian voters who elected him,” Mr. Mwanza said. Mr. Mwanza told the Oasis Forum that by definition, an autocracy was a Government of one man, a system of Government in which supreme power was concentrated in the hands of one person and whose decisions were subject to neither external legal restraints nor regularised mechanisms of popular control and not the nonsense they were claiming. He said it was absurd and infantile for anyone to claim that President Lungu was an autocrat when he was presiding over a sovereign and constitutional republic were every citizen was enjoying his or her democratic and human rights that were fully protected by the people’s Constitution. “Our laws provide for autonomy and peremptory separation of powers. By virtue of our Republican Constitution, the Executive cannot direct nor usurp the authority or powers of either the Judiciary or the Legislature and for the Oasis forum to claim otherwise, is simply malicious, “To complain about everything and to oppose everything for the sake of opposing is unproductive and frankly speaking, simply myopic and un-Zambian Every country on this earth has its own challenges and struggles. However, we all have the ability to stand together and summon our intellectual adroitness and use our physical strength to plan smart and work hard and ease the burden,” he said. He said any honest adult knew and could attest to the fact that Zambia had made tremendous progress in all facets of development and could not be compared the way it was before independence.