NG’ANDU Magande says Rupiah Banda is cheating in order to cleanse himself.
Reacting to Banda’s statement that the PF used appetising promises to wrestle power from MMD when he officiated at the launch of FODEP’s ‘Increasing accountability and dialogue on political party manifesto fulfillment in Zambia’, Magande wondered where the former president got the courage to say some of the things he said.
“When I saw what he had said, I said to myself, ‘so he has this kind of courage to say all those things’. I am sure if I was at that event, he would not have said what he said,” he said.
“I understand he has now been given up to February to appear back in court, he wants to take this time to cleanse himself. That is the politics that you see him playing, so that there is a lot of sympathy.”
Magande said Banda was not being truthful about his position on various issues when he suffered as president such as the benefits of the windfall tax which he used to build roads prior to the 2011 elections.
“When he arrived on the throne, he found US$485m from the windfall tax; why didn’t he tell the public that that money was realised from the windfall tax that Mwanawasa had introduced and that he did not want to use it? Why did he take that money out of the special account where the money was being kept and started building roads which he was claiming it was him doing?” he asked. “He removed that money and put it in the general account and started doing roads that he was boasting about but later went to Parliament and said, ‘I am removing this tax’.
In the same budget in which they were removing this tax, they had budgeted for roads in the US$485m. So he cannot be cheating people. It is simply that our leaders lack integrity, integrity to do what one has said. He is saying this windfall tax is not useful when he thrived on money from the windfall tax.”
And Magande said Banda wanted salaries for civil servants to be hiked as opposed to his encouragement that it was not prudent to do so because the government did not have enough money.
“If we were in the same forum and he said what he said that ‘me I refused to offer new salaries to civil servants’, I would have said you are the one who said ‘what the civil servants are getting are very little amounts… after all I might not be here’. He is excluding himself from the public service now when he was the one saying, ‘can I get more money so that I retire on a better note’, so really I was shocked when I heard what he had said,” he said.
Magande also castigated Banda for claiming that the PF was ushered into power on a sugar-coated manifesto, stressing that the former president himself did not even know what it took for a party to come up with a manifesto, let alone implement it.
“As Banda is criticising other parties’ manifestos, the manifesto which he was implementing when he came into office was the MMD manifesto of 2005 and in 2005, he was just in Chipata while the people who wrote the manifesto and all those who helped Mwanawasa to implement the manifesto were doing so,” he said.
“How does he start blaming other political parties to say they come up with sugar-coated manifestos? Where is his which is not sugar coated? Mr Banda didn’t even understand the MMD manifesto.”
Magande said what Banda should be doing is repenting of his misdeeds and not exonerating himself.