We have reached a stage where the only response to President Edgar Lungu is “Yes bwana”, says former Copperbelt Minister Mwenya Musenge.

And Musenge says the Patriotic Front will not survive beyond 2021 unless the party reverses its adoption of President Lungu as its sole candidate.

Featuring on a special edition of Muvi TV’s The Assignment programme yesterday, Musenge observed that anyone who challenged the Head of State became his enemy.

“We have reached a stage where whatever the President says, the response should be ‘yes bwana’, when you speak out to say ‘no sir, this cannot be done in such a manner, let us try and do it in this way’, then you become an enemy of the President, you become an enemy of the members within the party. The challenge is within the party, especially those who are surrounding the President,” Musenge said.

And Musenge said there was no future of the PF.

“I don’t think there is a future for the Patriotic Front forming government in 2021 unless they reverse that statement that its only Edgar Chagwa Lungu wamuyayaya, if they reverse that maybe they can form government. Fielding Edgar Chagwa Lungu in 2021, I don’t think I need to campaign. I will just go to sleep and wait for the voting day to go and cast my vote and and everything will be totally different. We were perceiving and hoping that PF could govern for probably another 50 years or so but with the turn of events, this is their last term, these five years, that’s it,” Musenge said.

“There are a lot of issues within the Patriotic Front, there is total disunity in the party and the party does not agree with certain decisions that are being made and you know in the central committee there are individuals who have personalized the party, they think it’s only them but they are forgetting that they have failed. And they think that probably they are going to drag people to re-elect them and when you are in government, your duty is to strive hard to make yourself relevant to the electorates. The people have lost confidence in PF, I can confidently say so.”

Musenge said his expulsion from the ruling party gave him freedom to speak and do whatever he wanted.

“Nobody can stop me from forming a political party because I want to continue participating in the politics of this country. The decision to expel me was the best decision that the party could ever have done because it gave me the freedom to do whatever I want. Of course if you may recall, I made some statements, statements which I believed and I still believe in which the party did not agree with for example the incarceration of Hakainde Hichilema, I never supported that. Secondly whatever happened to The Post Newspaper, I had to believe in that. We could have done far much better than that as a political party. Moreover you ought to understand that we are in a multi political dispensation therefore we need to be very very cautious with certain decisions that we do. To try and protect the multi party dispensation that we have as a meeting,” he said.

“Kambwili has taken his own route to defend his position in PF, I am outside and I don’t want to go to court to try and challenge my expulsion from the home that my father built; Michael Chilufya Sata, I will be outside and continue making noise from outside. The most important part is that now I have the freedom of speaking whatever I want to speak about. It was very hard to speak and that is why I have been expelled simply because I said ‘Mr President we beg you, this HH you have arrested will destabilize our party’ which is very true.”

He observed that PF officials were spending too much time on fighting each other.

“The fear is that if we are going to have such kind of leaders full for deceivers, liars and what have you, then you are not going to be a leader, the entire vision of Michael Chilufya Sata is lost because we are spending so much time fighting one another, telling lies and doing things which are totally not right. So for me my conscious is very clear and over a period of time, I had opted to remain silent because I started seeing things which were not working out for the party we fought for,” said Musenge.

“The unfortunate party in the party is that there are so much lies being told to the Head of State and the other unfortunate part is that the Head of State is not given time to reflect, to try and find out. I share the sentiments of Chishimba Kambwili, everything that was said in that meeting was a lie, and it is so unfortunate that fabrications were allowed, you fail to understand because on the government part, we really need to be professional, we have to bring out factual information.”