UPND Secretary General Stephen Katuka says it is gross indiscipline for State House Spokesperson Amos Chanda to liken the brain of Hakainde Hichilema and his members to those of rats, just because he has been privileged to save in his current position.

And Katuka has charged that it is Chanda or his boss who have rats brains, and not the opposition leader.

Last week, Chanda addressed a press briefing where he announced that President Edgar Lungu would not go to the dialogue table with people who had brains like those of rats. He further said the opposition alliance was a collection of criminal elements who President Lungu would not dialogue with.

But reacting to the President’s Special Assistant for Press and Public Relations, Katuaka told News Diggers in an interview that what Chanda was doing was unacceptable and out of his lane as a civil servant.

“I think the dialogue process is being spearheaded by the Church, I hear the Church called for a meeting yesterday (Saturday) and they are calling for another one today (Sunday), so they are handling that themselves. So then who is Amos Chanda to talk like that? He’s just a small little rat, he’s not even worth responding to. To start with, Amos Chanda is a civil servant, but now, he has turned himself into a politician who is attacking political leaders and talking politics all the time. This is the indiscipline that has come int the country under the Patriotic Front. There is so much indiscipline that people do not know what they are supposed to do. They pick people from all over the streets and give them jobs, in the PF you can be picked from the streets and be made a Permanent Secretary. You can be picked from any where and made a Presidential Spokesman,” Katutka charged.

“How did Chanda become a Presidential Spokesman? They just picked him because they saw that he was stranded. So that’s why he has become so insolent and sarcastic. And I will tell you that is gross indiscipline. How can any sensible adult describe another human being who is even of a higher level than him in status that he has a rat’s brain? That’s indiscipline and I think it’s him Chanda who has a rat’s brain or his boss.”

Katuka said the PF and police were responsible for the ongoing political violence in the country.

“The PF are the ones who are in charge of power right now, they are the ones in government but there is no political will to this dialogue from the Patriotic Front. Not only that, the perpetrators of violence are the Patriotic Front in collusion with the police. When our member was shot at by the police at the High Court, the police officer who shot him was promoted. But when PF cadres were butchered in Sesheke during the by-elections, the police officers were fired, look at the contrast,” Katuka lamented.

“In Nyanja they say ‘Ciwamina galu kuluma mbuzi’, mbuzi ikaluma galu ninshi nima loza. This is what is happening now. We have a cadre who is moving around with a bullet in his body up to now, a matter that was reported to the police and a well known PF cadre shot him. The gun was surrendered to the police by myself, but up to now, nothing has happened. When I was on a Radio programme with Mwaata Katongo, she said ‘no we didn’t know the victim. We are looking for him but we didn’t find him’, which was nonsense to me. How can police fail to find a person involved in a big incident like that? And they know that he’s a party member. Everyone knows that the person who was shot at was a UPND party member. So a party member has an established office, so if you want to find a PF member, you know where to find him. But they have never come to my office or brought a call out wanting to see the victim but they say they failed to find him. The police is failing us because they are always in collusion with the PF, they have been compromised under Kanganja.”

Katutka further accused the Electoral Commission of Zambia (ECZ) of tolerating violence.

“So as we approach the elections, we should expect chaos as usual because the ECZ too enjoys that, why I say is, if you remember before nominations of the Sesheke elections, we stormed the ECZ to tell them that it can’t be life as usual where we let people butcher each other and an election happens and we wait for the results without doing anything about it. So it is ECZ who are the referees. They are not doing what they are supposed to do. Even after the Sesheke brutality, I have not heard a comment from ECZ, they have been quiet because for them it’s business as usual. They want to announce the next election now and we have already heard threats from the ruling party that there will be bloodshed. The ECZ should have come in, but they are doing nothing, they are just impotent and that’s the whole problem, institutions of governance are compromised,” said Katuka.