… Sata says Mumba has been pleading to meet him
By SUNDAY MAIL REPORTER
PRESIDENT Sata is shocked at Pastor Nevers Mumba’s decision to deliberately distort facts surrounding an honest conversation he had with him and turned it around with a coat of lies and illusions.
The President is also surprised that the preacher has decided to continue to openly show contempt for the judiciary even when he faces contempt charges before the same judiciary.
President Sata was reacting to Pastor Mumba’s allegations made in the wake of a conversation he held with Pastor Mumba in which the preacherman practically begged the head of State to accord him a ‘secret meeting’ or audience without a clear agenda.
“I am surprised that the so-called pastor has decided to suffer from temporary amnesia and distort an honest and cordial conversation in which he wanted to meet me,” President Sata said.
“I gave him my private number, I personally dictated the number to him as he sounded really desperate. I challenge him to deny that I gave him my personal number to make an appointment.”
President Sata was reacting to Pastor Mumba’s remarks made yesterday at a press conference where the MMD leader made remarks about the judiciary and called for early elections.
President Sata responded through his special assistant for press and public relations, George Chellah.
Mr Sata also questioned Pastor Mumba’s leadership quality for supporting nurses that took illegal strike action, which he says the pastor should in fact be condemning instead of criticizing the government for acting decisively in order to save lives.
“How can he pretend to talk on behalf or symathise with the nurses when he was in the forefront of encouraging them to take illegal strike action with other irresponsible opposition characters?” President Sata asked.
“Good leaders are supposed to ask workers to act within the law not outside the law and the suffering the nurses are facing now must be squarely blamed on him and other irresponsible figures.”
In retrospect, President Sata reflected that Pastor Mumba perhaps missed his original calling when he was choosing a career, “he must have been a Hollywood script writer because he has such a wild imagination. It’s also shocking he can weave some lies around and make them appear as if they are the gospel truth.”
The head of State, however, advised Pastor Mumba to take extreme caution with the manner in which he continues to show contempt for the judiciary, “because as a person who stands accused of various offences before the courts, he walks on thin ice.”
President Sata expressed regret that a conversation held in brotherly manner between one leader and another has been used to try and question his character as a State President endorsed by the Zambian people.
Yesterday, Pastor Mumba held a media briefing at which he accused the Sata-led Government of allegedly influencing the large toll of nullification of parliamentary seats, the dismissal of nurses and a conversation in which the President allegedly threatened him with a jail sentence.
Conversely, especially regarding the nullified polls, Home Affairs Minister Edgar Lungu who is also Chawama law-maker described Pastor Mumba as, “a man of great contradictions…when the courts rule in favour of his party, the judiciary is a darling but when he loses the judiciary is rotten…what kind of thinking is this.”
In his parting shot, however, President Sata asked Pastor Mumba to do an exhaustive analysis and try to figure out why it is MMD legislators that are losing seats out of petitions and not UPND law-makers that also contested the 2011 polls.
“The trend appears to be negative on the MMD because corruption was inherent in his party that is the simple reason why,” President Sata said. “Pastor Mumba, however, in his usual desperate manner, thinks he can dissuade the people from the facts that the MMD is corrupt and he was seeking to have a secret meeting with me for some unknown reason.”
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