People’s Alliance for Change (PAC) president Andyford Banda says the PF through their vote buying schemes are targeting women as they are the majority voters.

In an interview, Banda said the scheme is however unsustainable and that the PF will have to find other ways of manipulating the electorates.

“We have learnt something about the PF and that is that there is nothing that they will tell us that will be true. We heard Honourable Musukwa the other time saying that they have advised their members to stop dishing out money because they were a pro-poor party and their dishing out of money does not reflect who they are. But that’s not the situation and they always issue such statement. And obviously that money is from corruption. And there is no will from the PF to fight corruption, we have said this before,” he said.

“So, institutions such as the Drug Enforcement Commission, the Anti-Corruption Commission cannot do anything to investigate the source of this money because if they were working we would have seen them investigating this issue. People must realise that the splashing of cash is just a PF campaign tool as well as a way of vote buying. It is not anything to show that they care. They are basically buying votes and people should realise that this kind of empowerment is not sustainable. They will not do this forever. If you want sustainable empowerment program, it cannot be coming from PF leaders it should be coming from institutions such as the Citizens Economic Empowerment Commission.”

He said President Lungu has failed lamentably and he has not reason to want to stand again, regardless of weather he is eligible or not.

“So, we as PAC we fund the splashing of money, the buying of votes as a crime, unfortunately it cannot be investigated by the right institutions they don’t have the powers to fight state employers. And for us, President Lungu has failed completely. Whether he is eligible or not to stand again I think we should focus more on his performance because one thing that we need to understand is that PF is a system. So, even if you put another person there, the system will still be there. And what we should focus on is to remove that system. Because if we put someone there, the system will still remain,” said Banda.

“And it worries us when we hear statements such as ‘no matter what happens, President Lungu will still stand and retain power’, it is clear that the PF has actually corrupted the system and that’s the reason why they are so sure about these things. That is why they made sure that in the voter registration, they made sure that the opposition stronghold were not registered. And our message on women’s day is that our women have been marginalised for so long and that is why we see these empowerment schemes aimed at women. They want to take advantage of the women because the women are the majority voters as recorded in the voter registration. But they are not taking care of their needs.”