PATRIOTIC Front (PF) Deputy Chief Whip Tutwa Ngulube says the Opposition Alliance has blocked all its chances of ever forming government by rejecting Constitutional Amendment Bill Number 10 of 2019.

In an interview, Ngulube said the Opposition Alliance could not form government next year after rejecting Bill 10 because the formation of a coalition government clause represented their best chance of winning the 2021 general election.

“The parties in that Opposition Alliance have trapped themselves; they don’t know where to go. On one hand, they have rejected Bill Number 10, they can’t go back to Bill 10. On the other hand, they can’t form government. So, the only thing they can do is just to get trapped in the so-called alliance! Because as we are speaking right now, even HH himself is stuck. They rejected Bill Number 10, but they want to do exactly what is in the Bill. They have rejected deputy ministers, for example, but the UPND MPs in Parliament are busy pushing that they want to get six new whips on the UPND side. But what is the difference between a deputy minister and an opposition whip? It’s just the same. On the one hand, they reject a coalition government, but they’re still in an alliance. So, they have trapped themselves and now they cannot win any election, even if we put all of them together, they cannot win a single election. So, what this shows is that our opposition political parties in Zambia are full bluff, they talk but they can’t prove anything,” Ngulube said.

“If you talk of the UPND on its own, they wanted to stop an election before it happened in Chilubi, yet on social media they were busy telling people that they were going to win, so how do you stop an election, which you have already won? So, these people are full of contradictions and their statements are illogical. Most of their statements are so illogical that they can’t even be trusted because what they are saying and what they are doing are in opposite direction. So, first of all, they don’t know that by being in an alliance then they are already in a coalition government. That is why even when by-elections come, they fail to decide on which candidate is going to stand because they don’t know exactly what they are looking for.”

And Ngulube, who is also Kabwe Central PF member of parliament, said it would be hard for the current opposition in the country to unseat PF in the 2021 general election, especially after rejecting Bill 10.

“If there was a way of reminding them, we would have reminded them that it will be very difficult to unseat the PF in 2021 and so if they had supported the coalition government clause in Bill Number 10, chances of them forming government as a group would have been up by 10 per cent. But as we speak right now, the opposition in Zambia is doomed because apart from just peddling falsehoods and lies against government, no single opposition party has, up to today, come out to explain to the people what is wrong with Bill Number 10. So, it’s just time that they have trapped themselves and now they have nowhere to run to, they can’t run to Bill 10 because they have insulted it; they can’t even go to the people because they can’t explain what’s wrong with the Bill,” said Ngulube.

“Most of those political parties, even if they appear by name, they don’t even have structures on the ground. Some of them don’t even have secretariats. For example, that James Lukuku spokesperson of theirs, where is his political party operating from? Who is his secretary general? How many are they? It’s the same with almost five to six of them, they don’t even exist on the ground, they are just tu temba parties where people should now masquerade as being opposition leaders when in actual fact there is nothing for them to offer to the people of Zambia.”