‘UPND cadres looting treasury through CDF’
By Tony Nkhoma
UNITED Party for National Development (UPND) carders are mercilessly looting the national treasury in daylight plunder sugar-coated as increased Constituency Development Fund (CDF), the Zambia We Want (ZWW) party has said.
ZWW spokesperson Muhabi Lungu said in an interview yesterday the UPND took pleasure in fooling Zambians by politicising the CDF and using it for political appeasement.
Lungu said the UPND had fooled Zambians that CDF was not supposed to replace the mainline budget in the implementation of development projects.
“This argument of CDF has had a perennial problem. The whole idea of CDF was not that it should replace the mainline budget, which is the central government budget,” he said.
Lungu said CDF should not replace the mainline budget, a principle which the UPND had violated.
He said the idea of CDF was not to cheat people with huge allocations but to have a certain allocation for constituencies to sustain few projects which could not be funded by the central government.
“The whole idea of CDF was to have an allocation to constituencies which enabled constituencies to do a number of things, which were clearly the pleasure of the constituency. It has been politicised over the years by the UPND,” Lungu said.
He noted that the UPND was now fooling people that it had increased CDF when in fact, it was the mainline budget it had been duplicating.
“So much that the UPND now likes to fool people that they have allocated an enormous amount of money to CDF when they have just taken from mainline government allocations,” he said.
Lungu said hiding central government funding in the name of increased CDF allocation was a chance for the UPND to allow its carders to loot the treasury mercilessly.
He said with instructions coming from the central government on CDF, UPND carders were finding it easy to have access to the money.
“So this whole issue of CDF has to be re-looked at. Right now, you can’t challenge it very well because as we’ve already said, the Executive power of government is too strong. It’s overbearing,” Lungu said.
