People’s party leader Mike Mulongoti says stopping President Edgar Lungu from contest elections in 2021 cannot cause chaos.

And Mulongoti says the named 10 united opposition parties have only come together with a common agenda of helping to redeem Zambians from the many problems that they may be facing under the PF regime.

Commenting on the FODEP observation that continued bickering over President Lungu’s eligibility to contest 2021 elections would lead to instability in the country, Mulongoti said nothing of that sort would happen because President Lungu was not the law himself.

“We are all guided by the law. Nobody is beneath the law and nobody is above the law. Mr Lungu, besides this question of eligibility, he has breached the law on many occasions. Having done that, he has got no moral right to insist that the same law he abused must protect him to stand as Prescient in 2021. If you breach one clause in the Constitution, you’ve overturned the whole government. The PF must accept one thing, they are using their hearts instead of their heads when they insist that President Lungu can stand in 2021. The Constitution that was amended did not supplant the whole Constitution. So the old constitution is still there and this was just an amendment to the existing Constitution… but again, where we found the problem with the Concourt is that in answering the question, they said there was an irregularity in the question (petition),” Mulongoti observed.

“When they came to that stage, they should have stopped because if a question is irregular, you can’t change it because it’s not your question. Once you begin to change the question to suit what you want to interpret and pass judgment on, then everything goes wrong. The Concourt made a mistake, the minute they realised that the question was irregular, they should have said ‘no, we can’t answer it because it’s irregular’ and then they would have sort the mandate of the people who applied for interpretation. But they ignored that and went on to make a decision based on their new understanding of the question. There is a principle at law that says ‘don’t answer a question you’ve not been asked’. So the Concourt answered a question they were not asked. But whoever thinks there will be chaos… chaos over what? Is Mr Lungu the father of every Zambian? Is he the father for all of us that we should obey him without question? No! The President is not the law, he’s a servant of the people and when his time is up, he must be ready to leave.”

Meanwhile, commenting on Zambia Centre for Inter-party Dialogue (ZCID) Spokesperson Jackson Silavwe’s concerns that the alliance opposition political parties must not pre-empty items earmarked for discussion at the national dialogue table, Mulongoti said politicians had the right to discuss any matter, provided they are within the law.

“We are political parties with a common agenda to help redeem the people of Zambia from a lot of problems that they are facing. Our role as political parties is to provide checks and balances and we can do it as individual political parties or collectively, that’s still within the law. Then secondly, the issue of dialogue is not between PF and UPND. It’s dialogue for all of us, so we are free to express our views and because of that, there is nothing wrong with us discussing the issues on the dialogue table. These are issues we’ve been championing all along, why should we all of a sudden be closed out? Why?” asked Mulongoti.