TRANSPORT and Communications Minister Mutotwe Kafwaya says the opposition UPND has embarrassed itself by releasing a plagiarised manifesto.

Speaking when he appeared on Diamond TV’s ‘Diamond Live’, Monday evening, Kafwaya said the opposition party had cheated on their manifesto because it was not their work.

“Releasing a manifesto is some effort and you [would] want to congratulate [the] UPND but you see, releasing a plagiarised manifesto is actually a bad effort. And because of that plagiarism, you want to ask them to withdraw it because that is not their work, that is the work of other people, that is theft. The theft that many in UPND accuse others of involving in. I listened to Cornelius Mweetwa the other day when he was talking about the fact that he is going to miss Ephraim Belemu because they stood on the same platform condemning the corruption in PF,” he said.

“When UPND was cheating that Zesco has been taken by Chinese, ZNBC has been taken by the Chinese, people were thinking this cheating will come to an end. Now they have internalised cheating to an extent where their capacity to cheat has now gone to their policy documents. I don’t see anything about this manifesto. What I see is that UPND has embarrassed itself further. They should bring back the ten point plan. I criticised it from its start to its end. This is why mid-way through they produced one manifesto which was in reverse. They were talking about 2016-2021. An election which is 70 percent gone. And now they have released another one plagiarised.”

And Kafwaya said there was no national unity in the UPND manifesto.

“All of those nice words you have established which are in that plagiarised manifesto are meaningless if you don’t mean them. What is national unity if you still maintain only a Tonga can be your President? There is zero national unity there. You are saying ‘we have now brought people from all over the country. Our National Management Committee now has everybody from all over the country’. The first time you made a declaration, it was not about those positions, the only declaration you have ever made is that for you, ‘a president can only be a Tonga’ and you are stuck in there. So what national unity is that?” he questioned.

“The corruption you are talking about, have you ever pointed at an individual and say ‘that is a guy who is corrupt? We have made our investigations, we have made our analysis’ what they talk about are transactions, and transactions don’t have a soul. The people who will be voting are these people who live in Chelstone, these people who live in Kamanga, in Avondale who today are travelling fifteen minutes from that Tank in Chelstone into downtown. It is these people who live in Kanyama who have a first level hospital which never existed. Those are the people who will be voting. And then these people will be saying there is corruption, these are empty words coming from a group that knows how to cheat.”

Kafwaya further said the recently held PF general conference was democratic.