PF disciplinary committee chairperson Tutwa Ngulube says some PF members attended the Women’s Day celebrations because the decision to shun the event wasn’t communicated to them on time.

In an interview, Ngulube said it would be difficult to discipline anybody who attended the event because of the communication lapse.

“My investigations have revealed that the communication to the members did not reach the members on time. Some of the people that participated didn’t know that there was an order not to attend. In such circumstances, it is very difficult to punish people unless they did it willingly. In any event, we will be having central committee meetings this Saturday to see what members of the central committee will decide to do. So we will try to raise the issue. But to us, I don’t think that is a matter that should worry us too much. PF is a very big party, defiance by very few members does not change discipline levels in the party, unless people can honestly tell us that they have defied. The truth of the matter is most PF members are too loyal to the orders of the leadership of the party,” he said.

He said the PF had bigger problems to concentrate on like the party convention and electing a new president.

“Whatever the case we have much bigger issues to preoccupy ourselves than a small group of people that attended the celebrations or didn’t attend. The PF government should be looking at bigger problems like the convention and replacing the party president and so on. So all those who want to bring confusion in the name of their freedom of expression and association, we just ignore them. We know all they want [is] to distract the party from uniting. For me, whether a person attends or doesn’t attend it is not so much of a big deal because those are public holidays. There are gazetted holidays. Yes, we have reasons that we should protest [but] that in itself does not stop us as a party from existing. So whether you attend or don’t attend, it doesn’t change anything,” said Ngulube.