Maravi

Hichilema urges UPND MPs to push for constitution conference Bill

Hichilema urges UPND MPs to push for constitution conference Bill
By Mwala Kalaluka
Tuesday July 10, 2007 [04:00]

UPND president Hakainde Hichilema has asked party members of parliament to push for the constitution conference Bill in the National Assembly. Meanwhile, Patriotic Front (PF) president Michael Sata told his party’s members of parliament to be in the forefront in pushing for the adoption of the constitution through a popular and broad participatory mode. In a message to UPND parliamentarians ahead of the resumption of Parliamentary sittings today, Hichilema said they should do the correct thing for the country.

“My message to all members of parliament is that go there and do the correct thing for the Zambian people and the correct thing is the enactment of the constitutional conference bill,” he said. “Go there and push for the constitutional conference bill and ensure that its composition is representative of the Zambian society.”

The presidents’ forum organised by the ZCID agreed to come up with a constitutional conference and government undertook to take the bill to this current session of the National Assembly. And Hichilema said the Zambia Centre for Inter-party Dialogue (ZCID) risked being irrelevant if it insisted on working outside the people’s will on the constitution review process. Hichilema said the ZCID should be a platform for doing positive things – doing what people want - on the constitution-making process.

“If they are going to do things outside what the people of Zambia want, they will be irrelevant,” Hichilema said. “We want to have the right composition of the constitutional conference.”

He insisted that for the constitutional conference to conform to what the public expected the constituent assembly to do, its composition must be broad-based.
Hichilema said politicians that realised they made mistakes when they opposed the constituent assembly, the generally desired mode of adopting the constitution according to the Mung’omba report, should never use ZCID.

“ZCID is not a platform to marginalise the rest of society, it must be relevant to Zambians,” he said. “We’ve got to look at the concerns of the people.”

Hichilema also said he was in the process of consulting the other members of the UPND on what their final position should be over MMD’s Katele Kalumba chairing the ZCID. Hichilema urged UPND parliamentarians to do the correct thing for the people in view of the constitutional debate as they get back to the House.

Highlighting Sata’s address to the parliamentarians at a meeting in Lusaka, PF spokesperson Given Lubinda said the PF president told them to be in push for the adoption of the constitution through a popular mode.

“He cautioned his members of parliament not to follow the myopic view of other politicians who say that the civil society should be put in the second position in the constitution-making process,” Lubinda said.

He said Sata urged the civil society to continue taking a leading role in the constitution making process. Lubinda said Sata urged the parliamentarians to focus their attention on issues affecting the majority Zambians. Sata told the parliamentarians to ensure that they influence government policies.

“He commended the members of parliament on their performance during the last sitting of Parliament. He urged them to be more visible in the next sitting,” Lubinda said.

Sata said the parliamentarians did not have the capacity to research hence the party had resolved to set up the office of a permanent secretary at the party’s secretariat. Sata told the parliamentarians that the party’s permanent secretary would be researching on their behalf and keep them abreast with current debates so that they were equipped with relevant information for them to debate adequately in Parliament.

On the Zambia Centre for Inter-party Dialogue (ZCID), Lubinda said the PF had been vindicated when it demanded that Kalumba should not be ZCID chairman because he was an interested party.

Labels: HAKAINDE HICHILEMA, PF, SATA, UPND, ZCID

posted by MrK @ 4:05 AM