Civil Society for Constitution Agenda (CiSCA) Chairperson Bishop John Mambo says printing ballot papers locally is a non starter because elections will be rigged even before voting.

In an interview, Tuesday, Bishop Mambo rejected President Edgar Lungu’s call to print 2021 ballot papers locally.

“This calling of the ballot papers being printed locally, that to me is a non starter. Because elections will be rigged before going in the polling box. We have failed to speak with one voice. Even where the government has sent people through ECZ to countries like South Africa, Dubai, we have come back quarreling that the ballot papers where dubiously printed and so forth. Now for Zambia, are you going to bring angels?” Bishop Mambo wondered.

He said ballot papers could be printed locally if government would recruit angels.

“Unless they are going to recruit angels then we can print these ballot boxes because corruption is by the day. Right now there are ‘Christians for Nevers Mumba’, Christians for Lungu, which is unheard of in the Bible. So the country is divided. What it needs now is healing. Let us not experiment on the mistakes of the last election. Let us find a country [to print from], of course not Dubai. If it’s going back to South Africa, well and good [because] they have shown us that their democracy has grown so we can go back to them and trust them to print. So we should not experiment with things that should graduate our democracy,” he said.

And Bishop Mambo urged believers to be content with what God had blessed them with other than acquiring riches dubiously.

“I’m agreeing with Bishop [Joe] Imakando where he was saying at a church service which was attended by HH and others that ‘anything that is evil acquired in terms of riches, cannot last’. Its not only that, you have no happiness. You have no peace of mind, you don’t sleep at night. Believers should always be content with what God has blessed them with other than having the riches that we are seen in Zambia. For instance, yesterday I didn’t have a bicycle and then the following day, I have vehicles that we do not know where they are coming from. Meaning that we no longer want to serve. We want to enrich ourselves using the poor whom we use during the elections and the church is quiet. And those of us who speak out on such evil, we are called politicians and all name calling,” said Bishop Mambo.

“Zambia being a christian nation would have been a better place to live in if we all learned to share what we have. But those who are rich have become filthy rich, they have even forgotten their families and where they come from. As a result we now have an army of street kids and orphans.”