UPND secretary general Stephen Katuka says Mutati’s MMD national secretary Raphael Nakacinda is a nonentity who cannot be taken serious by anyone.

Recently, Nakacinda charged that UPND leader Hakainde Hichilema was a contraceptive to national unity and dialogue.

But in an interview, Katuka said Nakacinda was just a joke.

“We know even now, Nakacinda can go around the country nobody talks about him. He has been allowed to go to Chipata, he has been to Western Province addressing meeting, the PF is not even worried. They allow him to hold meetings anywhere. If I leave today to go to Chipata, I tell you tomorrow I will be in cells or my meeting will be dispersed. If Hakainde goes into Lubamba market just to buy cabbages, tomorrow he will be summoned by the Police. So those are facts, we should not hide and pretend that all is well when we know the truths. We have 44 political parties, in Zambia. But some are there by name only. If today, they say something nobody will even look at who is talking. But whatever I say, whatever HH says, there will be response from PF. So its about the two parties. Sunday Chanda, every statement you issue today, there will be a response tomorrow. Nakacinda is a joke. He is just a joke. He is a nonentity. Now we have two MMDs, has he made attempts to restore the peace in MMD as a party?” Katuka asked.

He wondered what efforts Nakacinda had made to restore unity in his own party.

“If they have the capacity. Even if you look at ZCID (Zambia Council for Inter-Party Dialogue) , that is the problem that we have had for a long time. What have they done to try and resolve the issue that is local? That has been with us for a very long time? Nakacinda is a Secretary General and there is another Secretary General for the same party. So, if he has the capacity to resolve, why haven’t they resolved those issues? For us we are serious about the dialogue because we know that it affects us so much. And we know that it requires people who are serious to resolve serious issues, those issues. They are not specifically for the UPND and PF, but the whole nation. We are looking at issues that affect the Zambia people as a country. That what we are interested in. For instance we can say the rule of law under the PF has not been respected. individual lives, Freedoms and liberties, the public order act which was there under the MMD and the UNIP governments, but our observance is that its not applied the same today,” he said.

Katuka insisted that the Zambia Concil for Inter-Party Dialogue did not have the capacity to resolve the differences between the UPND and PF.

“We are all members of the Commonwealth. Hakainde was incarcerated for no reason. He was incarcerated for no reason we all know that he was in prison for 127 days. Where was ZCID? What did they do if they have the capacity? And now they want to jump on the bandwagon because somebody else has started it? We can never allow them to lead the process. They say ‘no locally we can do it, we are the only people who can do it’. Why? Those are surrogates being used by the PF to derail this process. That is all. What is wrong with people who came in? [Patricia] Scotland came in, flew from London to here and intervened and it worked. We all saw that it was the effort of external forces that made Hakakinde come out of prison. So, it’s only the external forces that can help in the dialogue process. I’m saying there is no capacity locally apart from the Church. And the church can only go a certain distance via commitment. There is no capacity in the country to resolve tricky disputes,” said Katuka.

“We are all in ZCID but what did we do to resolve an internal problem? If you failed then why do you want to come in now? That was an internal problem for sure and we needed to deal with it locally but no word came from ZCID. So, we don’t have the capacity locally and we won’t settle for them. But you see they want to be champions of a process that other people have started. And we have got small parties there that have no membership, its ‘nashala neka party’ they are the ones who want to champion this cause. We have an example today of MMD, to date we still have two factions. They have never sought their problems out. In the last election I will tell you, and this is the record you can check. In the last election 98 per cent of the votes were shared between UPND and PF. All these other small parties shared two percent. So the problem is about the two big parties not any other party.”