UPND want deputy ministers

THE UPND are the ones that proposed the reintroduction of Deputy Ministers in the constitution (amendment) Bill 10 of 2019, nominated Member of Parliament Raphael Nakacinda has said.

Mr Nakacinda said the UPND were hypocrites and wanted to deceive the citizenry in the manner they were handling the proposed amendments to the constitution because they were playing double standards.

He said during the Patriotic Front interactive forum in Lusaka yesterday that all political parties including the UPND met at the PF secretariat in 2018 requesting the president to halt the process of taking the draft Bill to Parliament because they wanted to have an input themselves.

Mr Nakacinda said all political party secretary-generals went to Siavonga and participated in making proposals to the Constitution amendments.

He stated that the UPND was in the forefront in making some of the proposals in the Amendment Bill 10 which it now calls controversial.

“It’s just that we have accepted that hypocrisy and deceit should be part of politics. UPND were the ones who were proposing that we need to reintroduce deputy ministers.

“They were the ones who were proposing reintroduction of deputy ministers as part of the structural changes that need to happen because they felt that Government needs to change the way that it is running now. There is some loopholes that they felt needed to be cured by the reintroduction of deputy ministers.

“But today who is signing the loudest about condemning the reintroduction of deputy ministers? It’s the UPND themselves. That document was generated by the UPND themselves, so they should participate,” Mr Nakacinda said.

He said while in Siavonga, the UPND legal representative was the one who drafted the statement and agreement of all the proposed amends to the constitution, including the extension of the period through which the presidential petition should be heard. Mr Nakacinda said the UPND generated and all political parties appended their signatures because it carried the spirit with which everything was agreed.

“The only thing that needed to be done was for us to find a platform so that those now would be condensed into a Bill and that is where the confusion started. That confusion now continued because of double standards.

“You come from Siavonga it’s your document, you start rejecting it. You now say we are not part of it, we are not part of ZCID, we want the church to give us a road map,” he said.

Mr Nakacinda said the Bill that was in Parliament was a product of the National Dialogue Forum (NDF) and not the Patriotic Front because all political parties participated.