CITIZENS CAUTIONED AGAINST EMBRACING ‘HELL-BENT’ OPPOSITION

..Advised against insults

OPPOSITION leaders have no message for the Zambians ahead of the August elections and are inciting people to rise against the government using falsehoods, Patriotic Front (PF) Chimwemwe constituency aspiring candidates

Banda has charged.

He said UPND leaders have no solutions to the economic challenges the country was facing, the reason why they were failing to explain how they would deal with such problems.

Mr Banda, who was in the company of Itimpi councillor, Mpasa Mwaya, the aspiring

Allen

Kitwe Mayor, was speaking in an interview.

"It's with no doubt that some of the people aspiring to form government are full of personal interests and if elected into government they will use their positions to enhance their business interests. They even fail solutions to economic problems.

"This is why they incite people with falsehoods.

A person with genuine interests to form government and serve people will not celebrate when bad things happen to the people," Mr Banda said

Mr Banda, advised the electorate to analyse the quality of parliamentary and local government candidates from the opposition propaganda and

POLITICIANS and other interest groups should avoid name calling and insults during the August general elections campaign, Continental Leadership

Research Institute (CLRI) has urged.

CLRI Executive Director,

Paul Mundia Hakoola, said the competition to serve people could not be reduced to insults and street talk but must be measured with serious benchmarks of developmental indicators.

Mr Hakoola said the country could not achieve meaningful development if politicians did not articulate their vision for the country on matters of national interest such the fight against corruption.

"As an institute, we are concerned about the policy surrounding the fight against corruption, and as the country heads to August 2021 polls we are looking at all political players, we want to know what kind of policies that have been put in place to inspire the Zambian people in terms of the fight against corruption.

"We believe that we cannot achieve meaningful development if there is no adequate policies and political will to fight against corruption and that if there are weaker systems that allow the looting of public and development aid," he said.

Mr Hakoola said politicians should be able to tell the nation their policies and how they intend to fight corruption as one of the benchmarks.

"In as much as we can have good revenue collecting systems from different sources such as ZRA and other bodies that remit revenue to the national coffers, without policies and political will, the intended results for development cannot be achieved. “We need clear policy framework on the fight against graft by all political parties and this is one of the benchmarks for the 2021 elections that Zambians will be looking at,” he said. Mr Hakoola challenged all political parties to focus on issue based advocacy and clearly state on how they would fight against corruption.