PUNISH UPND IN CHAWAMA
…Show your love for Tasila, People’s Pact urges voters
By Thandizo Banda
THE People’s Pact Movement (PPM) has appealed to the people of Chawama Constituency in Lusaka to punish the United Party for National Development (UPND) by voting for opposition candidate Bright Numdwe on Thursday.
Meanwhile, President Hakainde Hichilema must withdraw the court case in South Africa over the burial of late former president Edgar Lungu, People’s Pact vice president Peter Sinkamba has said.
Sinkamba urged the electorate in Chawama to turn up in their numbers on Thursday and vote an opposition candidate in the by-election to express their dissatisfaction with the current state of things in Zambia and the mistreatment of the Lungu family by Hichilema.
“Where is their morality? UPND used all manner of cruelty to grab the Chawama seat from Tasila [late president Lungu’s daughter] at a time she was still sleeping in the sitting room mourning her father,” Sinkamba said.
The people of Chawama will be voting for their new member of Parliament in the Thursday parliamentary by-election.
Meanwhile, President Hakainde Hichilema must withdraw the court case in South Africa over the burial of late former president Edgar Lungu, Sinkamba has said.
He said the buck stopped at Hichilema whose government had taken late Lungu’s family to court in a foreign country to halt his burial in July last year.
“Can he [Hichilema] introspect on this sensitive matter and allow finality,” he said.
Sinkamba said the matter should be left to the family to dictate closure.
“The continued involvement by the State has politicised Lungu’s death and continues to be a recipe for breeding tension in the country,” he said.
“It is morally, traditionally wrong and an embarrassment to Zambia and Africa as a while, to witness how the government obtained an injunction to block the burial of a former head of State. Provided government does not withdraw the case, Lungu’s remains will remain in the morgue for a longer time.”
Sinkamba said Lungu’s burial case would go down in history and perhaps earn a place in the Guinness Books of World Records as the longest staying head of state’s body in a mortuary.
“Hichilema should not run the country using hatred by punishing a former late president by keeping his body in the fridge,” he said.
Lungu died in Johannesburg, South Africa, on June 5 last year but he is yet to be buried because of an ongoing legal battle between the Zambian government and his family over where he should be buried and whether Hichilema should attend.
