DEPUTY Parliamentary Chief Whip Tutwa Ngulube says UPND should blame the councillor exodus it is currently experiencing on its refusal to support Bill 10.

In an interview, Ngulube argued that UPND’s support for Bill 10 could have blocked councillors from resigning, which would have also avoided unnecessary by-elections.

“You see, that’s why we have always said that, they have trapped themselves because they don’t want Bill 10, but they want benefits from it. So, how is that possible? It’s not going to work out. Their failure to understand the whole picture is what is actually causing all these problems. If the UPND had actually understood the essence of Bill 10 from the word go, we would have done away with all these by-elections. We would have done away with all this political uncertainty. But because they have been deceiving themselves, they are now finding themselves in all these problems,” Ngulube said.

“And since councillors have now lost confidence in the UPND and now they are saying, ‘let’s just ditch them’, it shows that they have not even been fair to their own people; they have not been fair to their councillors and they’ve also not been very fair to themselves and to the nation at large. That is why they are now in this situation where councillors are leaving them every day and there is nothing they can do.”

And Ngulube, who is also Kabwe Central PF member of parliament, said the ongoing resignation of councillors should give UPND an opportunity to have a change of heart about Bill 10.

“So, the only way out of this is to support Bill 10. Let them come back to the drawing board and support Bill Number 10 because for as long as they do not support Bill 10, they will continue crying! And that’s what we were even telling them the very last time that, look, on one hand, you don’t want Bill 10, but you are busy crying that there are too many by-elections…on the second hand, the same people who have been fighting Bill 10 are the same ones also crying about the elections! So, there are a lot of things that are in Bill 10, which needed their support. If we had actually dealt with Bill 10 earlier, some of these councillors would not be resigning anyhow because it would have blocked them and it would have been very difficult for them to reach where they have reached,” said Ngulube.