United Party for National Development President Hakainde Hichilema has called on Zambians to reject the draft land policy, saying it is meant to alter traditional land boundaries and cause conflict.

And Hichilema urged News Diggers! Newspaper to ‘dig deeper’ and expose more irresponsible expenditure by the PF regime.

Speaking at a press briefing in Lusaka Wednesday, Hichilema said the PF government planed to sell land to foreigners using the draft policy by altering boundaries in Chiefdoms.

“Land is a basic factor of production. You want to build a factory you need land. It is an instrument used to benefit citizens in many ways, I have already illustrated. We have a lot of riches in our country. And these reaches sit on land. We will not allow this land to be taken away from us by the PF. That is what they want to do in case you are not aware. We want to protect communal grazing areas, we want to protect canals, we want to protect rivers and streams from pollution. Not what is happening to Chongwe river where water has been polluted by these foreigners who acquired land illegally from the PF,” he told a gathering.

“PF are moving from no policies to damaging policies, because they are used to ‘cipante pante’, they have no policies. You can see how they are developing this land [policy, it’s based-on picking and just copying. Maybe somebody was copying when they were not in their right mind, as you know they could have been ‘dizzy’. UPND has a clear policy on land. We in the UPND want to strengthen the institutions of our traditional leaders, in our country and across all the provinces of Zambia, so that they can continue being the custodians of our land and cultural values. We in the UPND and the UPND government will take traditional leaders as partners in development. We will not interfere in the succession processes, that is for traditional systems to choose who becomes senior headman like me – whether someone likes it not I’m senior headman.”

HH said the UPND would reverse the bad PF policies on land.

“The UPND will go back to all the traditional boundaries as they were drawn. Even the bible is clear, you will not change the boundaries made by your forefathers because you are going to bring conflict. That’s what the PF is doing they are changing boundaries. And they want to be selling traditional land. You will now see more conflict between chiefs. I know PF has altered a lot of boundaries in the last six years or so. That’s unacceptable. The duty of the UPND Government is to foster peace among people and development, not to sow seeds of conflict. This attempt by the PF to take away our land is another form of our freedom struggle,” HH said.

And HH applauded News Diggers! over the exposé detailing extravagant govt spending on President Lungu’s trips, and encouraged the newspaper to ‘dig deeper’.

“PF is dismantling our assets, PF is damaging our economy, they are damaging our reserves. I hope you know that strategic reserves are at their lowest. Poor people’s money, the money that you should be using to build poor people’s toilets and providing clean water is being used for dances by the PF. It is used to buy these bicycles we are talking about. We know of all this information, so ‘ba’ News Diggers continue doing this great work. dig dipper, dig dipper and keep that evidence for future use because we will need it.”