DEMOCRATIC Party president Harry Kalaba says the PF is to blame for the Electoral Commission of Zambia’s shortcomings.
On Friday, ECZ Chief Electoral Officer Patrick Nshindano said the Commission had so far registered about 4.3 million eligible voters.
“Let me take this opportunity to mention that the Commission continues to make tremendous progress in registering voters and the following statistics have been recorded in the past three phases of the voter registration exercise. These are the cumulative statistics of the three phases of the exercise. In phase one, the Commission registered 1,100,006 voters. In phase two, the Commission registered 1,598,426; in phase three, which is the current phase we are reporting on, the Commission has registered 1,616,893 voters bringing our total to 4,321,319, the total currently registered for the first, second and third phase,” said Nshidano.
Commenting on this in an interview, Kalaba said if PF was an organised party, ECZ wouldn’t be having any challenges.
“For me, what is in shambles is not the Electoral Commission of Zambia, what is in shambles is the Patriotic Front because of the PF. If the Patriotic Front was effective then the Electoral Commission of Zambia should be effective. In my own view, the ECZ requires support instead of having backlashes because we all know when you are at a hump in your own home, you don’t buy mealie meal, will you blame your son? You will not. So it is the Patriotic Front leadership which is warped, it is the PF leadership which is wrong, it is the Patriotic Front leadership which needs to get out soon before this country just collapses completely, because everything is in a quagmire everything is stuck. That is typical of the PF,” Kalaba said.
Kalaba said the PF did not take the electoral process seriously.
“Governance has now become child’s play, which is not right. They are doing all sorts of things, they had money to buy bicycles for village headmen but they don’t have money for the electoral process, which should usher them in government. This is not being serious! For me I don’t even like wasting my time with PF because talking about PF like they way we are talking now is missing the big point. So far so good, the numbers of people registering as voters is good despite the difficulties they are going through. Let us wait and see if ECZ will not extend or not then we will talk about the process,” said Kalaba.
