Kasama is mine – GBM

UPND vice-president for administration Geoffrey Bwalya Mwamba says he will retain his Kasama Central seat should there be a by election because people there still have confidence in him.

Mr Bwalya, popularly known as GBM, said the PF should not take the victory of Lubansenshi as a barometer for winning the Kasama seat.
He said UPND was ready for the Kasama Central by-election and that he would scoop the seat come what may.
Mr. Mwamba said he had won the Kasama seat on the MMD ticket which was then more powerful than PF, adding that he saw nothing that could make him fail to grab the seat from PF.
“I won the election in 2008 on MMD ticket which was a more powerful force than PF. Even this time people have resolved that they will give it to me, with the current economic crisis which the people of Zambia are going through, I don’t think the PF can win the election,” he said.

He claimed that the people of Northern Province were ready to give chance to the UPND because they had seen that the PF Government had failed to tick in all sectors of the country.
“The loss of Lubansenshi seat to PF will not stop me from winning the Kasama Central parliamentary seat because people of Kasama still have confidence in me,
“Who doesn’t know that the PF has failed in all sectors, people of Northern Province are ready for change, they do not want the PF Government, they have seen what the PF Government has done in the last nine months,” he said.

Mr Mwamba explained that the loss of Lubansenshi to PF did not mean that he had failed to deliver Northern Province to UPND.
He said the victory of PF in Lubansenshi did not reflect the people’s true feelings in the province because the elections were marred with corruption.
“Lubansenshi seat was marred with corruption. I personally saw a senior official in the province giving the electorate K50 to K100, and mind you, Father Bwalya was there for more than a month just after the nominations; he was there and he started bribing the electorates with money and food,” Mr. Mwamba said.
He claimed that he had evidence for the corruption which happened in Lubansenshi where the PF used money to buy votes from the electorate. “In our view we did not want to corrupt the electorates because we knew if we did that then we were corrupting the minds of the voters and they will be voting for a candidate not of their choice; we didn’t do that although we had the capacity to do it,” Mr. Mwamba said. He said it could be seen with the continued depreciation of the Kwacha that the PF had failed.
“Look at the rate of the dollar, the price of fertilizer, the price of seeds, literally everything, everything has collapsed, the PF Government has failed in all sectors,” Mr. Mwamba said.

zambia daily nation