LUNGU ROASTS RETROGRESSIVE MPS

By Kalobwe Bwalya

THERE has been a lot of fighting in Parliament amongst Members of Parliament which has rendered the House a platform for determining who makes the loudest noise and this has overshadowed progressive debates, Moses Lungu has observed.

Speaking to The Scoop, Reverend Lungu Zambian MPs were copying bad vices from other parliaments and that the development had compromised the dignity and decorum of the House and that the substance of parliamentary debates was being reduced to mere rhetoric as a result.

He noted that the compromised debate that had engulfed the House was not development-focused and that the diminishing respect among Parliamentarians was painting a very bad picture on political players in the country. 

He observed that while the Speaker of National Assembly Nelly Mutti has been strong in ensuring that Parliament did not degenerate into a circus where MPs exchanged bad words instead of debating with substance, there were MPs who were puffed up with causing acrimony in the House.

“The current Parliament is a serious scam because there is no order in the House at all and anyone could cause unnecessary Points of Order or pass running commentaries while their colleagues are on the floor. They do this without shame yet this is a respected House where our laws are made.

“There is too much pettiness in the House and as a result, serious national issues are trivialised and this is why we witness that commotion from time to time. It looks like some of our MPs have no idea on how to debate with a sober mind and so, the only thing to do is divert the attention of the House from serious issues,” Rev. Lungu said.

He said the tug of war between the ruling and opposition Members of Parliament even on issues of national importance on which they were supposed to work together, simply showed how much some of them had no regard for Parliament despite being elected by Zambians.

“Three years down the line, people have gotten their mid- term gratuities and they have been actually getting their allowances and a number of emoluments as their entitlement but when they are called on to debate serious issues for which they were elected, all we see are unnecessary fights.

“This is why some of them have nothing to show for their respective constituencies because they have no clue what they were elected for as people’s representatives. They are simply absentee landlords and these must be replaced in 2026 because they have proved to be failures,” he said. 

Meanwhile, Rev. Lungu has charged that most UPND MPs had nothing to show for in their constituencies because they were absentee landlords who were not in touch with the electorates since winning the 2021 elections.

He said while in opposition, UPND MPs were claiming that their constituencies had remained underdeveloped because the Government was not giving the incentives such as the Constituency Development Funds (CDF) which was not only distributed to all the constituencies across the country, but came with increased allocation since their own party formed the Government.

He alleged that most constituencies in which the UPND had MPs had remained the same because the people who were elected had abandoned the people who chose them and that they would only start retreating to their constituencies by next year to position themselves for re-adoption and re-election in 2026.