Maravi

Kabimba discusses failed PF-UPND pact

Kabimba discusses failed PF-UPND pact
By Moses Kuwema
Mon 02 Jan. 2012, 13:58 CAT

WYNTER Kabimba says he had a lot of misgivings about the PF winning elections in a pact with UPND because the latter was in it for competition. In an interview, Kabimba who is PF secretary general, said the PF would not have won the September 20 elections had the pact with the UPND been sustained.

"It was clear from the beginning that the UPND had come into the pact in bad faith. It was clear from the beginning that the UPND had come into the pact not to add to the strength of PF but to weaken PF and that grudge weakening of PF was beginning to emerge during the period of the pact because the competition then had shifted from being a competition between UPND and PF vis-à-vis MMD. It became an internal competition between UPND and PF so we spent a lot of time now trying to size each other up. Which group was more intelligent? Which group had more educated people? Which group had richer people than the other? So those became the issues," he revealed.

Kabimba said a person could be very rich financially but a poor politician if he could not inspire the people, because inspiring people was about character and personality.

He said the PF paid a lot of money to a Kenyan company to help them carry out the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) during the September 20 general elections.
Kabimba said in order to employ the PVT, they had to engage a company from Kenya, which he did not name.

"As you may know, this PVT was a very contentious issue. The government was against it, the MMD was against it so we had to find a way of making sure we have our PVT system in place. I can disclose now that in order to do that, we had to employ a company from Kenya, which had experience in this PVT," he said.

Kabimba said the company worked with the national strategy and campaign committee of the party and a lot of money was paid to it.

"We paid a lot of money but now we realise that it was a lot of investment," he said.

Kabimba said because of the PVT, the PF knew of their victory on Thursday September 22.

"We were able between Wednesday September 21 and Thursday 22 to collect results from more than 80 per cent of the polling stations way ahead of Electoral Commission of Zambia. By Thursday lunch hour on the 22nd, when ECZ had results for 116 constituencies, we had, through our PVT system, results for 137 constituencies. You can see the difference. ECZ had results for 116 which they posted on their website. Our compiling centre had results for 137 constituencies so we had 13 constituencies to go. We sat down and looked at the voter registration and the figures in the 13 constituencies and we realised even if MMD got a 100 per cent in all the constituencies which was not possible, they would still not overtake us because at that stage, our results were 1, 132,000 against MMD's 912,000," he said.

Kabimba said at this stage, he even went to brief President Michael Sata that the PF had won the election but that he did not believe him.

"Of course, he did not believe me at that stage because we had lost elections in the past, so that is the progression of the many challenges we had," he said.

Kabimba also said the satellite phones that they got helped them get results from far-flung areas where there was no mobile phone network coverage.

"Our objective was to collect results from the polling stations so that before results are tampered with, we know what the results are, so it did not matter to us what happens at the tallying centre, what happens at Mulungushi because we already had results collected from the polling station as soon as they were cast and as soon as they were announced," he said.

Kabimba further said the PF had realised that they had been going into elections without planning and usually mistook the huge rallies that President Sata used to address as being synonymous with the number of votes that PF would get.

"This time around we decided we were not going to judge our popularity and the votes through rallies. We were actually going to do a scientific approach. A committee was set up and this committee had to plan for elections, generally as a principle. And we studied the pattern of voting or the pattern of how these results were spread out amongst the political parties. We also dealt with permutations. We had to do some permutations of these results, and we also had to study the concentration of voters. Where were the voters concentrated? What was the demography of the voters? We followed the registration of voters very closely. We tried to find out which group of people had registered more than the other? Was it the men, the adult youths, was it the women?" Kabimba explained.

Labels: PF-UPND, UPND, WYNTER KABIMBA

posted by MrK @ 5:17 PM